Three Famous Short Novels

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William Faulkner

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Faulkner, William,
1897 - 1962 .

Three famous short
novels .

THREE FAMOUS SHORT NOVELS
BY WILLIAM FAULKNER

Three Famous
Short Novels

by

WILLIAM FAULKNER

SPOTTED HORSES
OLD MAN
THE BEAR

VINTAGE BOOKS

A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE

New York

Vintage Books Edition, March 1961

Copyright 1931, 1939 by Random House, Inc.
Copyright 1942 by William Faulkner
Copyright 1942 by Tne Curtis Publishing Company
Copyright renewed 1958 by William Faulkner
Copyright renewed 1966 by Estelle Faulkner and
Jill Faulkner Summers

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Spotted Horses appears in The Hamlet;
Old Man appears in The Wild Palms; and
The Bear appears in Go Down , Moses .

Manufactured In the United States of America

E98

THREE FAMOUS SHORT NOVELS

Spotted Horses 3
Old Man 77

The Bear 185

SPOTTED HORSES

1

A LITTLE while before sundown the men lounging
about the gallery of the store saw, coming up the road from
the south, a covered wagon drawn by mules and followed
by a considerable string of obviously alive objects which in
the levelling sun resembled vari-sized and -colored tatters
tom at random from large bilIboards--circus posters, say
—-attached to the rear of the wagon and inherent with its
own separate and collective motion, like the tail of a kite*
“What in the hell is that?” one said.

J

4 WILLIAM FAULKNER

“It's a circus,” Quick said. They began to rise, watching
the wagon. Now they could see that the animals behind the
wagon were horses. Two men rode in the wagon*

“Hell fire,” the first man — his name was Freeman — said.
••It’s Flem Snopes.” They were all standing when the
wagon came up and stopped and Snopes got down and ap-
proached the steps. He might have departed only this
morning. He wore the same cloth cap, the minute bow tie
against the white shirt, the same gray trousers. He mounted
the steps.

“Howdy, Hem,” Quick said. The other looked briefly at
all of them and none of them, mounting the steps. “Start-
ing you a circus?”

“Gentlemen,” he said. He crossed the gallery; they made
way for him. Then they descended the steps and ap-
proached the wagon, at the tail of which the horses stood
in a restive clump, larger than rabbits and gaudy as par-
rots and shackled to one another and to the wagon itself
with sections of barbed wire. Calico-coated, small-
bodied, with delicate legs and pink faces in which their
mismatched eyes rolled wild and subdued, they huddled,
gaudy motionless and alert, wild as deer, deadly as rattle-
snakes, quiet as doves. The men stood at a respectful dis-
tance, looking at them. At that moment Jody Varner came
through the group, shouldering himself to the front of it

“Watch yourself, doc,” a voice said from the rear. But it
was already too late. The nearest animal rose on its hind
legs with lightning rapidity and struck twice with its fore-
feet at Varner’s face, faster than a boxer, the movement
of its surge against the wire which held it travelling back-
ward among the rest of the band in a wave of thuds and
lunges. “Hup, you broom-tailed hay-burning sidewinders,”
the same voice said. This was the second man who had ar-
rived in the wagon. He was a stranger. He wore a heavy

Spotted Horses y

densely black moustache, a wide pale hat When he thrust
himself through and turned to herd them back from the
horses they saw, thrust into the hip pockets of his tight
jeans pants, the butt of a heavy pearl-handled pistol and a
florid carton such as small cakes come in. “Keep away from
them, boys,” he said “They’ve got kind of skittish, they
aint been rode in so long.”

“Since when have they been rode?” Quick said. The
stranger looked at Quick. He had a broad, quite cold,
wind-gnawed face and bleak cold eyes. His belly fitted
neat and smooth as a peg into the tight trousers.

“I reckon that was when they were rode on the ferry to
get across the Mississippi River,” Varner said The stranger
looked at him. “My name’s Varner,” Jody said

“Hipps,” the other said “Call me Buck.” Across the left
side of his head, obliterating the tip of that ear, was a
savage and recent gash gummed over with a blackish sub-
stance like axle-grease. They looked at the scar. Then they
watched him remove the carton from his pocket and tilt a
gingersnap into his hand and put the gingersnap into his
mouth, beneath the moustache.

“You and Flem have some trouble back yonder?” Quick
said The stranger ceased chewing. When he looked di-
rectly at anyone, his eyes became like two pieces of flint
turned suddenly up in dug earth.

“Back where?” he said.

“Your nigh ear,” Quick said

“Oh,” the other said. “That” He touched his ear. “That
was my mistake. I was absent-minded one night when I
was staking them out Studying about something else and
forgot how long the wire was.” He chewed They looked at
his ear. “Happen to any man careless around a horse. Put
a little axle-dope on it and you wont notice it tomorrow
though. They’re pretty lively now, lazing along all day do-

6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

tag nothing. It*fl work out of diem in a couple of days." He
put another gmgersnap into his mouth, chewing, “Dont you
believe they’ll gentle?” No one answered. They looked at
the ponles v grave and noncommittal Jody turned and went
back into die store. ’Them’s good, gentle ponies," the
stranger said. "Watch now." He put the carton back into
his pocket and approached the horses, his hand extended.
The nearest one was standing on three legs now. It ap-
peared to be asleep. Its eyelid drooped over the cerulean
eye; its head was shaped like an ironingboard. Without
even raising the eyelid it flicked its head, the yellow teeth
cropped. For an instant it and the man appeared to be in-
extricable in one violence. Then they became motionless,
the stranger’s high heels dug into the earth, one hand grip-
ping the animal’s nostrils, holding the horse’s head
wrenched half around while it breathed in hoarse, smoth-
ered groans. “See?” the stranger said in a panting voice, the
veins standing white and rigid in his neck and along his
jaw. “See? All you got to do is handle them a little and
work hell out of them for a couple of days. Now look out
Give me room back there.” They gave back a little. The
stranger gathered himself then sprang away. As he did so,
a second horse slashed at his back, severing his vest from
collar to hem down the back exactly as the trick swords-
man severs a floating veil with one stroke.

“Sho now,” Quick said. “But suppose a man dont hap-
pen to own a vest"

At that moment Jody Varner, followed by the black-
smith, thrust through them again. “All right Buck,” he
said. “Better get them on into the lot. Eck here will help
you." The stranger, the several halves of the vest swinging
from either shoulder, mounted to the wagon seat the
blacksmith following.

“Get up, you transmogrified hallucinations of Job and

Spotted Horses j

Jezebel,” the stranger said. The wagon moved on, the
tethered ponies coming gaudily into motion behind it, be-
hind which in turn the men followed at a respectful dis-
tance, on up the road and into the lane and so to the lot
gate behind Mrs Littlejohn’s. Bek got down and opened
the gate. The wagon passed through but when the ponies
saw the fence the herd surged backward against the wire
which attached it to the wagon, standing on its collective
hind legs and then trying to turn within itself, so that the
wagon moved backward for a few feet until the Texan,
cursing, managed to saw the mules about and so lock the
wheels. The men following had already fallen rapidly back.
••Here, Eck,” the Texan said. “Get up here and take the
reins.” The blacksmith got back in the wagon and took the
reins. Then they watched the Texan descend, carrying a
looped-up blacksnake whip, and go around to the rear of
the herd and drive it through the gate, the whip snaking
about the harlequin rumps in methodical and pistol-like
reports. Then the watchers hurried across Mrs Littlejohn’s
yard and mounted to the veranda, one end of which over-
looked the lot

“How you reckon he ever got them tied together^
Freeman said.

“I’d a heap rather watch how he aims to turn them
loose,” Quick said. The Texan had climbed back into the
halted wagon. Presently he and Eck both appeared at the
rear end of the open hood. The Texan grasped the wire
and began to draw the first horse up to the wagon, the
animal plunging and surging back against the wire as
though trying to hang itself, the contagion passing back
through the herd from animal to animal until they were
rearing and plunging again against the wire.

“Come on, grab a holt,” the Texan said. Eck grasped
the wire also. The horses laid back against it, the pink

8 WILLIAM FAULKNER

faces tossing above the back-surging mass. ‘Tull him up,
pull him up,” the Texan said sharply. “They couldn’t
get up here in the wagon even if they wanted to.” The
wagon moved gradually backward until the head of the
first horse was snubbed up to the tail-gate. The Texan took
a turn of the wire quickly about one of the wagon stakes.
“Keep the slack out of it,” he said. He vanished and re*
appeared, almost in the same second, with a pair of heavy
wire-cutters. “Hold them like that,” he said, and leaped.
He vanished, broad hat, flapping vest, wire-cutters and all,
into a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of long teeth and wild eyes
and slashing feet, from which presently the horses began
to burst one by one like partridges flushing, each wearing
a necklace of barbed wire. The first one crossed the lot at
top speed, on a straight line. It galloped into the fence
without any diminution whatever. The wire gave, re-
covered, and slammed the horse to earth where it lay for
a moment, glaring, its legs still galloping in air. It scram-
bled up without having ceased to gallop and crossed the
lot and galloped into the opposite fence and was slammed
again to earth. The others were now freed. They whipped
and whirled about the lot like dizzy fish in a bowl. It had
seemed like a big lot until now, but now the very idea that
all that fury and motion should be transpiring inside any
one fence was something to be repudiated with contempt,
like a mirror trick. From the ultimate dust the stranger,
carrying tho wire-cutters and his vest completely gone now,
emerged. He was not running, he merely moved with a
light-poised and watchful celerity, weaving among the
calico rushes of the animals, feinting and dodging like a
boxer until he reached the gate and crossed the yard and
mounted to the veranda. One sleeve of his shirt hung only
at one point from his shoulder. He ripped it off and wiped
his face with it and threw it away and took out the paper

Spotted Horses 9

carton and shook a g lng ermap Into his hand. He was
breathing only a little heavily. “Pretty lively now,** he
said. “But it’ll work oat of them in a couple at days." The
ponies still streaked back and forth through die growing
dusk like hysterical fish, bat not so violently now.

“What’ll yon give a man to reduce them odds a little
for yon?” Quick said. The Texan looked at him, die eyes
bleak, pleasant and hard above the chewing jaw, die
heavy moustache. “To take one of them off year hands?"
Quick said.

At that moment the little periwinkle-eyed boy came
along die veranda, saying, “Papa, papa; where’s papa?"

“Who you looking for, sonny?” one said.

“It’s Eck’s boy,” Quick said. “He’s still oat yonder in
the wagon. Helping Mr Bode here.” The boy went on to
the end of the veranda, in diminutive overalls— a miniature
replica of the men themselves. '

“Papa,” he said. “Papa.” The blacksmith was still lean-
ing from the rear of the wagon, stiIl holding the end of die
severed wire. The ponies, bunched for the moment, now
slid past the wagon, flowing, stringing out again so that
they appeared to have doubled in number, rushing on;
die hard rapid light patter of unshod hooves came out of
(he dust. “Mamma says to come on to supper," the boy
said.

The moon was almost full that. When supper was over
and they had gathered again along the veranda, die alter-
ation was hardly one of visibility even. It was merely a
translation from die lapidary-dimensional at day to the
treacherous and silver receptivity in which die horses
huddled in mazy camouflage, or singly or in pairs rushed,
fluid, phantom, and unceasing, to huddle again in mirage-
like clumps from which came high abrupt squeals and the
Vicious thudding of hooves.

IO WILLIAM FAULKNER

Ratliff was among them now. He had returned Just bo-
fore supper. He had not dared to take his team into the
lot at alL They were now in Bookwright’s stable a half
mile from the store. “So Flem has come home again,** ho
aakL “Well, well, well . Will Varner paid to get him to
Texas, so I reckon it aint no more than fair for you fellows
to pay the freight on him back.** From the lot there came
a high thin squeal. One of the animals emerged. It seemed
not to gallop but to flow, bodiless, without dimension*
Yet there was the rapid light beat of hard hooves on the
packed earth.

“He aint said they was his yet,** Quick said.

“He aint said they aint neither,** Freeman said.

“I see,** Ratliff said. “That’s what you are holding back
on. Until he tells you whether they are his or not. Or
maybe you can wait until the auction’s over and split up
and some can follow Flem and some can follow that Texas
fellow and watch to see which one spends the money. But
then, when a man’s done got t rimm ed, I dont reckon he
cares who’s got the money.”

“Maybe If Ratliff would leave here tonight, they
wouldn’t make him buy one of them ponies tomorrow,”
a third said.

“That’s a fact,” Ratliff said. “A fellow can dodge a
Snopes if he just starts lively enough. In fact, I dont believe
he would have to pass more than two folks before he would
have another victim intervened betwixt them. You folks
aint going to buy them things sho enough, are you?” No-
body answered. They sat on the steps, their backs against
the veranda posts, or on the railing itself. Only Ratliff and
Quick sat in chairs, so that to them the others were blade
silhouettes against the dreaming lambence of the moonlight
beyond the veranda. The pear tree across the road opposite
was now in full and frosty bloom, the twigs and branches

Spotted Horses n

springing not outward from the limbs but standing motion*
less and perpendicular above the horizontal bought tike the
separate and upstreaming hair of a drowned woman sleep*
ing upon the uttermost floor of the windless and tideless
sea.

“Anse McCaDum brought two of them horses back from
Texas once," one of the men on the steps said. He did not
move to speak. He was not speaking to anyone. “It was a
good team. A little light He worked it for ten years. Light
work, it was.”

“I mind it,” another said. “Anse claimed he traded four*
teen rifle cartridges for both of them, didn’t he?”

“It was the rifle too, I heard,” a third said.

“No, it was just the shells,” the first said. “The fellow
wanted to swap him four more for the rifle too, but Anse
said he never needed them. Cost too much to get six of
them back to Mississippi.”

“Sho,” the second said. “When a man dont have to in-
vest so much into a horse or a team, he dont need to expect
so much from it” The three of them were not talking any
louder, they were merely talking among themselves, to one
another, as if they sat there alone. Ratliff, invisible in the
shadow against the wall, made a sound, harsh, sardonic,
not loud.

“Ratliffs laughing,” a fourth said.

“Dont mind me,” Ratliff said. The three speakers had
not moved. They did not move now, yet there seemed to
gather about the three silhouettes something stubborn,
convinced, and passive, like children who have been
chidden. A bird, a shadow, fleet and dark and swift, curved
across the moonlight, upward into the pear tree and began
to ring; a mockingbird.

“First one I’ve noticed this year,” Freeman said.

“You can hear them along Whiteleaf every night;” the

IX WILLIAM FAULKNER

first man said. "I heard one in February. In that snow.
Singing in a gum.”

“Gum is the first tree to put out,** the third said. That
Was why. It made it feel like singing, fixing to put out that
way. That was why it taken a gum.**

“Gum first to put out?” Quick said. "What about wil-
low?”

"Willow aint a tree,” Freeman said. “It’s a weed.”

“Well, I dont know what it is,” the fourth said. “But it
aint no weed. Because you can grub up a weed and yon
are done with it I been grubbing up a dump of willows
outen my spring pasture for fifteen years. They are the
same size every year. Only difference is, it’s just two or
three more trees every time.”

"And if I was you,” Ratliff said, "that’s just exactly
where I would be come sunup tomorrow. Which of course
you aint going to do. I reckon there aint nothing under the
sun or in Frenchman’s Bend neither that can keep you folks
from giving Flem Snopes and that Texas man your money.
But Fd sholy like to know just exactly who I was giving
my money to. Seems like Eck here would tell you. Seems
like he’d do that for his neighbors, dont it? Besides being
Flem’s cousin, him and that boy of his, Wallstreet, helped
that Texas man tote water for them tonight and Bek’s
going to help him feed them in the morning too. Why,
maybe Eck will be the one that will catch them and lead
them up one at a time for you folks to bid on them. Aint
that sight* Eck?”

The other man sitting on the steps with his back against
the post was the blacksmith. "I dont know,” he said.

“Boys,” Ratliff said, “Eck knows all about than horses.
Flem’s told him, how much they cost and how much him
and that Texas man aim to get far them, make off of diem.
Come on, Eck. Tell us.” The other did not move, sitting an

Spotted Horses i 3

the top step, not quite facing them, sitting there beneath
the successive layers of their quiet and intent concentrated
listening and waiting.

“I dont know,” he said. Ratliff began to laugh. He sat in
the chair, laughing while die others sat or lounged upon the
steps and the railing, sitting beneath his laughing as Eclc
had sat beneath their listening and waiting. Ratliff ceased
kughing. He rose. He yawned, quite loud.

“All right- You folia can buy them critters if you want
to. But me, Pd just as soon buy a tiger or a rattlesnake. And
if Flem Snopes offered me either one of them, I would be
afraid to touch it for fear it would turn out to be a painted
dog or a piece of garden hose when I went up to take pos-
session of it I bid you one and all good night.” He entered
the house. They did not look after him, though after a
while they all shifted a little and looked down into the lot,
upon the splotchy, sporadic surge and flow of the horses,
from among which from time to time came an abrupt
squeal, a thudding blow. In the pear tree the mockingbird’s
idiot reiteration pulsed and purled.

“Anse McCallum made a good team outen them two of
hisn,” the first man said. “They was a little light. That was
alL”

When the sun rose the next morning a wagon and three
saddled mules stood in Mrs Littlejohn’s lane and six men
and Eck Snopes’s son were already leaning on the fence,
looking at the horses which huddled in a quiet dump bo-
fore the bam door, watching the men in their turn. A sec-
ond wagon came up the road and into the lane and stopped,
and then there were eight men beside the boy standing at
the fence, beyond which the horses stood, their Wue-and-
brown eyeballs rolling alertly in their gaudy faces. “So this
here is the Snopes circus, is it?” one of the newc o mers said.
He glanced at the faces, then he went to the end of the row

14 WILLIAM FAULKNER

and stood beside toe blacksmith and toe little boy. “Are
them Flem’s horses?” he said to toe blacksmith.

"Eck dont know who them horses belong to any more
than we do,” one of toe others said. “He knows that Flem
come here on toe same wagon with them, because he saw
him. But that's all.”

“And all he will know,” a second said. “His own kin will
be toe last man in toe world to find out anything about
Hem Snopes's business.”

“No,” the first said. “He wouldn't even be that. The first
man Hem would tell his business to would be toe man that
was left after toe last man died. Hem Scopes dont even tell
himself what he is up to. Not if he was laying in bed with
himself in a empty house in the dark of toe moon.”

“That’s a fact,” a third said. “Hem would trim Eck or
any other of his kin quick as he would us. Ainl that right,
Eck?”

“I dont know,” Eck said. They were watching toe horses,
which at that moment broke into a high-eared, stiff-kneed
swirl and flowed in a patchwork wave across the lot and
brought up again, facing toe men along toe fence, so they
did not hear the Texan until he was among them. He wore
a new shirt and another vest a little too small for him and
he was just putting toe paper carton hack into his hip
pocket

“Morning, morning,” he said. “Come to get an early
pick, have yon? Want to make me an offer for one or two
before toe bidding starts and runs the prices up?” They had
not looked at the stranger long. They were not looking at
him now, but at the horses in toe lot which had lowered
their heads, snuffing into the dust.

“I reckon weH look a while first” one said.

“Yon are in tone to look at them eating breakfast any*
how,” the Texan said. “Which is more than they done with-

Spotted Horses i $

out they staid up all night” He opened the gate and en-
tered it At once the horses jerked their heads up, watching
him. ‘"Here, Bek,” the Texan said over his shoulder, “two
or three of you boys help me drive them into the bam.”
After a moment Eck and two others approached the gate,
the little boy at his father’s heels, though the other did not
see him until he turned to shut the gate.

“You stay out of here,” Eck said. “One of them things will
snap your head off same as a acorn before you even know
it.” He shut the gate and went on after the others, whom
the Texan had now waved fanwise outward as he ap-
proached the horses which now drew into a restive huddle,
beginning to mill slightly, watching the men. Mrs Little*
john came out of the kitchen and crossed the yard to the
woodpile, watching the lot She picked up two or three
sticks of wood and paused, watching the lot again. Now
there were two more men standing at the fence.

“Come on, come on,” the Texan said. “They wont hurt
you. They just aint never been in under a roof before.”

“I just as lief let them stay out here, if that’s what they
want to do,” Eck said.

“Get yourself a stick — there’s a bunch of wagon stakes
against the fence yonder — and when one of them tries to
rush you, bust him over the head so he will understand
what you mean.” One of the men went to the fence and got
three of the stakes and returned and distributed them. Mrs
Littlejohn, her armful of wood complete now, paused again
halfway back to the house, looking into the lot The little
boy was directly behind his father again, though this time
the hither had not discovered him yet The men advanced
toward the horses, the huddle of which began to break into
gaudy units turning inward upon themselves. The Texan
was cursing them in a loud steady cheerful voice. “Get in
there, you banjo-faced jack rabbits. Dont hurry them, now*

l6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Let them take their time. Hi! Get in there. What do you
think that bam is — a law court maybe? Or maybe a church
and somebody is going to take up a collection on you?"
The ewimnis fell slowly back. Now and then one feinted to
break from the huddle, the Texan driving it back each time
wife skillfully thrown bits of dirt Then one at fee rear saw
fee bam door just behind it but before fee herd could break
fee Texan snatched fee wagon stake from Eck and, fol-
lowed by one of the other men, rushed at the horses and
began to lay about fee heads and shoulders, choosing by
unerring instinct the point animal and striking it first
square in the face then on fee withers as it turned and than
on the rump as it turned further, so that when fee break
came it was reversed and fee entire herd rushed into fee
long open hallway and brought up against fee further wall
wife a hollow, thunderous sound like feat of a collapsing
mine-shaft. “Seems to have held all right," fee Texan said.
He and fee other man slammed fee half-length doors and
looked over them into fee tunnel of the bam, at fee fat end
of which the ponies were now a splotchy phantom moiling
punctuated by crackings of wooden partitions and fee dry
reports of hooves which gradually died away. “Yep, it held
all right," the Texan said. The other two came to fee doors
end looked over them. The little boy came up beside his
father now, trying to see through a crack, and Eck saw him.

"Didn’t I tell you to stay out of here?" Eck said. “Dont
you know them things will kill you quicker than you can
say scat? You go and get outside of feat fence and stay
there."

"Why dont you get your paw to buy you one of them.
Wall?” one of fee men said.

“Me buy one of them things?" Eck said. “When I can go
to fee river any time and catch me a snapping turtle or a
moccasin for nothing? You go on, now. Get out of here and

Spotted Horses 17

stay out” The Texan had entered the bam. One of the men
closed the doors after him and put the bar up again and
Over the top of the doors they watched the Texan go on
down the hallway, toward the ponies which now huddled
like gaudy phantoms in the gloom, quiet now and already
beginning to snuff experimentally into the long lipwom
trough fastened against the rear wall. The little boy had
merely gone around behind his father, to the other side,
where he stood peering how through a knot-hole in a plank.
The Texan opened a small door in the wall and entered it,
though almost immediately he reappeared.

“I dont see nothing but shelled com in here,” he said.
“Snopes said he would send some hay up here last night.”

“Wont they eat com either?” one of the men said.

“I dont know,” the Texan said. “They aint never seen
any that I know of. We’ll find out in a minute though.” He
disappeared, though they could still hear him in the crib.
Then he emerged once more, carrying a big double-ended
feedbasket, and retreated into the gloom where the parti-
colored rumps of the horses were now ranged quietly along
the feeding-trough. Mrs Littlejohn appeared once more, on
the veranda this time, carrying a big brass dinner belL She
raised it to make the first stroke. A small commotion set up
among the ponies as the Texan approached but he began to
speak to them at once, in a brisk loud unemphatic mixture
of cursing and cajolery, disappearing among them. The
men at the door heard the dry rattling of the corn-pellets
into the trough, a sound broken by a single snort of amazed
horror. A plank cracked with a loud report; before their
eyes the depths of the hallway dissolved in loud fury, and
while they stared over the doors, unable yet to begin to
move, the entire interior exploded into mad tossing shapes
like a downrush of flames.

“Hell fire,” one of them said. “Jump!” he shouted. The

l8 WILLIAM FAULKNER

three turned and ran frantically for the wagon, Eck last.
Several voices from the fence were now shouting some-
thing but Eck did not even hear them until, in the act of
scrambling madly at the tail-gate, he looked behind him
and saw the little boy still leaning to the knot-hole in the
door which in the next instant vanished into matchwood,
the knot-hole itself exploding from his eye and leaving him,
motionless in the diminutive overalls and still leaning for-
ward a little until he vanished utterly beneath the towering
parti-colored wave full of feet and glaring eyes and wild
teeth which, overtopping, burst into scattering units, reveal-
ing at last the gaping orifice and the little boy still standing
in it, unscratched, his eye still leaned to the vanished knot-
hole.

“Wall!” Eck roared. The little boy turned and ran fcs
the wagon. The horses were whipping back and forth
across the lot, as if while in the bam they had once more
doubled their number; two of them rushed up quartering
and galloped all over the boy again without touching him
as he ran, earnest and diminutive and seemingly without
progress, though he reached the wagon at last, from which
Eck, his sunburned skin now a sickly white, reached down
and snatched the boy into the wagon by the straps of Ms
overalls and slammed him face down across his knees and
caught up a coiled Mtching-rope from the bed of the
wagon.

“Didn’t I tell you to get out of here?” Eck said in a shak-
ing voice. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“If you’re going to wMp him, you better whip the rest of
ns too and then one of us can frail hell out of you,” one of
the others said.

“Or better still, take the rope and hang that dum fellow
yonder,” the second said. The Texan was now standing in
tho wrecked door of the bam, taking the gingersnap carton

Spotted Horses 19

from Us hip pocket “Before he kills the test of Brand**
man’s Bend too."

“You mean Flem Snopes," the first said. The Texan
tilted the carton above his other open palm. The horses still
rushed and swirled back and forth but they were beginning
to slow now, trotting on high, stiff legs, although thdr eyes
were still rolling whitely and various.

“I misdoubted that damned shell com all along," the
Texan said. “But at least they have seen what it looks like.
They cant claim they aint got nothing out of this trip." He
shook die carton over his open hand. Nothing came out of
it. Mrs Littlejohn on the veranda made the first stroke with
the dinner bell; at the sound the horses rushed again, die
earth of die lot becoming vibrant with the light dry clat-
ter of hooves. The Texan crumpled the carton and threw it
aside. “Chuck wagon," he said. There were three mom
wagons in die lane now and there were twenty or more men
at the fence when the Texan, followed by his three assist-
ants and the litde boy, passed through the gate. The bright
cloudless early sun gleamed upon the pearl butt of the pis-
tol in his hip pocket and upon the bell which Mrs Littlejohn
still rang, peremptory, strong, and loud.

When the Texan, picking his teeth with a splintered
kitchen match, emerged from the house twenty minutes
later, the tethered wagons and riding horses and mules ex-
tended from the lot gate to Varner’s store, and there were
more than fifty men now standing along the fence beside
the gate, watching him quietly, a little covertly, as he ap-
proached, rolling a little, slightly bowlegged, the high beds
of his carved boots printing neatly Into the dost “Morning,
gents,” he said. “Here, bud,” he said to the little boy, who
stood slightly behind him, looking at die protruding butt of
the pistol. He took a coin from his pocket and gave it to the
boy. “Run to the store and get me a box of gingersnaps.”

20 WILLIAM FAULKNER

He looked about at the quiet faces, protuberant, sucking
his teeth. He rolled the match from one side of his mouth
to the other without touching it “You boys done made
your picks, have you? Ready to start her off, hah?” They
•did not answer. They were not looking at him now. That is,
he began to have the feeling that each face had stopped
looking at him the second before his gaze reached it After
a moment Freeman said:

“Aint you going to wait for Flem?”

“Why?” the Texan said. Then Freeman stopped looking
at him too. There was nothing in Freeman’s face either.
There was nothing, no alteration, in the Texan’s voice.
“Eck, you done already picked out yours. So we can start
her off when you are ready.”

“I reckon not,” Eck said. “I wouldn’t buy nothing I was
afraid to walk up and touch.”

“Them little ponies?” the Texan said. “You helped
water and feed them. I bet that boy of yours could walk up
to any one of them.”

“He better not let me catch him,” Eck said. The Texan
looked about at the quiet faces, his gaze at once abstract
and alert, with an impenetrable surface quality like flint, as
though the surface were impervious or perhaps there was
nothing behind it.

“Them ponies is gentle as a dove, boys. The man that
buys them will get the best piece of horseflesh he ever
forked or druv for the money. Naturally they got spirit; I
aint selling crowbait. Besides, who’d want Texas crowbait
anyway, with Mississippi full of it?” His stare was still ab-
sent and unwinking; there was no mirth or humor in his
voice and there was neither mirth nor humor in the single
guffaw which came from the rear of the group. Two wagons
were now drawing out of the road at the same time, up to
the fence. The men got down from them and tied them to

Spotted Horses 2 1

the fence and approached. “Come tip, boys,** the Texan
said. “You’re just in time to buy a good gentle horse
cheap.”

“How about that one that cut your vest off last night?**
a voice said. This time three or four guffawed. The Texan
looked toward the sound, bleak and unwinking.

“What about it?” he said. The laughter, if it had been
laughter, ceased. The Texan turned to the nearest gatepost
and climbed to the top of it, his alternate thighs deliberate
and bulging in the tight trousers, the butt of the pistol
catching and losing the sun in pearly gleams. Sitting on the
post, he looked down at the faces along the fence which
were attentive, grave, reserved and not looking at him. “All
right,” he said. “Who’s going to start her off with a bid?
Step right up; take your pick and make your bid, and when
the last one is sold, walk in that lot and put your rope on
the best piece of horseflesh you ever forked or druv for the
money. There aint a pony there that aint worth fifteen
dollars. Young, sound, good for saddle or work stock, guar-
anteed to outlast four ordinary horses; you couldn’t kill one
of them with a axle-tree — ” There was a small violent
commotion at the rear of the group. The little boy ap-
peared, burrowing among the motionless overalls. He ap-
proached the post, the new and unbroken paper carton
lifted. The Texan leaned down and took it and tore the end
from it and shook three or four of the cakes into the boy’s
hand, a hand as small and almost as black as that of a
coon. He held the carton in his hand while he talked, point-
ing out the horses with it as he indicated them. “Look at
that one with the three stocking-feet and the frost-bit ear;
watch him now when they pass again. Look at that shoul-
der-action; that horse is worth twenty dollars of any man’s
money. Who’ll make me a bid on him to start her off?” His
voice was harsh, ready, forensic. Along the fence below

22 WILLIAM FAULKNER

him the men stood with, buttoned close in their overalls,
the tobacco-sacks and worn purses, the sparse silver and
frayed bills hoarded a coin at a time in the cracks of chim-
neys or chinked into the logs of walls. From time to time
the horses broke and rushed with purposeless violence and
huddled again, watching the faces along the fence with wild
mismatched eyes. The lane was full of wagons now. As the
others arrived they would have to stop in the road beyond
it and the occupants came up the lane on foot Mrs Little-
john came out of her kitchen. She crossed the yard, looking
toward the lot gate. There was a blackened wash pot set on
four bricks in the comer of the yard. She built a fire be-
neath the pot and came to the fence and stood there for a
time, her hands on her hips and the smoke from the fire
drifting blue and slow behind her. Then she turned and
went back into the house. “Come on, boys,” the Texan
said. “Who’ll make me a bid?”

“Four bits,” a voice said. The Texan did not even glance
toward it

“Or if he dont suit you, how about that fiddle-head horse
without no mane to speak of? For a saddle pony, I’d rather
have him than that stocking-foot I heard somebody say
fifty cents just now, I reckon he meant five dollars, didn’t
he? Do I hear five dollars?”

“Four bits for the lot,” the same voice said. This time
there were no guffaws. It was the Texan who laughed,
harshly, with only his lower face, as if he were reciting a
multiplication table.

“Fifty cents for the dried mud offen them, he means,” he
said. “Who’ll give a dollar more for the genuine Texas
cockle-burrs?” Mrs Littlejohn came out of the kitchen,
carrying the sawn half of a wooden hogshead which she set
on a stump beside the smoking pot, and stood with her
hands on her hips, looking into the lot for a while without

Spotted Horses 23

coming to the fence this time. Then she went back into the
house. “What’s the matter with you boys?” the Texan said.
“Here, Eck, you been helping me and you know them
horses. How about making me a bid on that wall-eyed ono
you picked out last night? Here. Wait a minute.” He thrust
the paper carton into his other hip pocket and swung his
feet inward and dropped, cat-light, into the lot The ponies,
huddled, watched him. Then they broke before him and
slid stiffly along the fence. He turned them and they
whirled and rushed back across the lot; whereupon, as
though he had been waiting his chance when they should
have turned their backs on him, the Texan began to run
too, so that when they reached the opposite side of the lot
and turned, slowing to huddle again, he was almost upon
them. The earth became thunderous; dust arose, out of
which the animals began to burst like flushed quail and into
which, with that apparently unflagging faith in his own in-
vulnerability, the Texan rushed. For an instant the watch-
ers could see them in the dust — the pony backed into the
angle of the fence and the stable, the man facing it, reach-
ing toward his hip. Then the beast rushed at him in a sort
of fatal and hopeless desperation and he struck it between
the eyes with the pistol-butt and felled it and leaped onto
its prone head. The pony recovered almost at once and
pawed itself to its knees and heaved at its prisoned head
and fought itself up, dragging the man with it; for an in-
stant in the dust the watchers saw the man free of the earth
and in violent lateral motion like a rag attached to the
horse’s head. Then the Texan’s feet came back to earth and
the dust blew aside and revealed them, motionless, the
Texan’s sharp heels braced into the ground, one hand grip-
ping die pony’s forelock and the other its nostrils, the long
evil muzzle wrung backward over its scarred shoulder
while it breathed in labored and hollow groans. Mrs Little-

24 WILLIAM FAULKNER

John was in the yard again. No one had seen her emerge
this time. She carried an armful of clothing and a metal-
ridged washboard and she was standing motionless at the
kitchen steps, looking into the lot Then she moved across
the yard, still looking into the lot, and dumped the gar-
ments into the tub, still looking into the lot. “Look him
over, boys,” the Texan panted, turning his own suffused
face and the protuberant glare of his eyes toward the fence*
“Look him over quick. Them shoulders and — ” He had
relaxed for an instant apparently. The animal exploded
again; again for an instant the Texan was free of the earth,
though he was still talking: “ — and legs you whoa Til tear
your face right look him over quick boys worth fifteen
dollars of let me get a holt of who'll make me a bid whoa
you blare-eyed jack rabbit, whoa!” They were moving now
—a kaleidoscope of inextricable and incredible violence on
the periphery of which the metal clasps of the Texan’s sus-
penders sun-glinted in ceaseless orbit, with terrific slowness
across the lot Then the broad clay-colored hat soared de-
liberately outward; an instant later the Texan followed it,
though still on his feet, and the pony shot free in mad, stag-
like bounds. The Texan picked up the hat and struck the
dust from it against his leg, and returned to the fence and
mounted the post again. He was breathing heavily. Still the
faces did not look at him as he took the carton from his hip
and shook a cake from it and put the cake into his mouth,
chewing, breathing harshly. Mrs Littlejohn turned away
and began to bail water from the pot into the tub, though
after each bucketful she turned her head and looked into
the lot again. “Now, boys,” the Texan said. “Who says
that pony aint worth fifteen dollars? You couldn’t buy that
much dynamite for just fifteen dollars. There aint one of
them cant do a mile in three minutes; turn them into pas-
ture and they will board themselves; work them like hell all

Spotted Horses 25

day and every time you think about it, lay them over the
head with a single-tree and after a couple of days every
jack rabbit one of them will be so tame you will have to
put them out of the house at night like a cat” He shook
another cake from the carton and ate it “Come on, Bek,”
he said. “Start her off. How about ten dollars for that horse,
Eck?”

“What need J got for a horse I would need a bear-trap
to catch?” Eck said.

“Didn’t you just see me catch him?”

“I seen you,” Eck said. “And I don’t want nothing as
big as a horse if I got to wrastie with it every time it finds
me on the same side of a fence it’s on.”

“All right,” the Texan said. He was still breathing
harshly, but now there was nothing of fatigue or breathless-
ness in it. He shook another cake into his palm and in-
serted it beneath his moustache. “All right I want to get
this auction started. I aint come here to live, no matter
how good a country you folks claim you got I’m going to
give you that horse.” For a moment there was no sound,
not even that of breathing except the Texan’s.

“You going to give it to me?” Eck said.

“Yes. Provided you will start the bidding on the next
one.” Again there was no sound save the Texan’s breath-
ing, and then the clash of Mrs Littlejohn’s pail against tho
ximof the pot.

“I just start the bidding,” Eck said. “I dont have to buy
it lessen I aint over-topped.” Another wagon had come up
the lane. It was battered and paintless. One wheel had been
repaired by crossed planks bound to the spokes with baling
wire and die two underfed mules wore a battered harness
patched with bits of cotton rope; the reins were ordinary
cotton plowlines, not new. It contained a woman in a
shapeless gray garment and a faded sunbonnet, and a man

2(5 WILLIAM FAULKNER

in faded and patched though clean overalls. There was not
room for the wagon to draw out of the lane so the man left
it standing where it was and got down and came forward —
a thin man, not large, with something about his eyes, some-
thing strained and washed-out, at once vague and intense,
who shoved into the crowd at the rear, saying,

"What? What’s that? Did he give him that horse?”

“All right,” the Texan said. "That wall-eyed horse with
the scarred neck belongs to you. Now. That one that looks
like he’s had his head in a flour barrel. What do you say?
Ten dollars?”

“Did he give him that horse?” the newcomer said.

“A dollar,” Eck said. The Texan’s mouth was still open
for speech; for an instant his face died so behind the hard
eyes.

“A dollar?” he said. “One dollar? Did I actually hear
that?”

“Dum it,” Eck said. “Two dollars then. But I aint ”

“Wait,” the newcomer said. “You, up there on the post”
The Texan looked at him. When the others turned, they
saw that the woman had left the wagon too, though they
had not known she was there since they had not seen
the wagon drive up. She came among them behind the
man, gaunt in the gray shapeless garment and the sunbon-
net, wearing stained canvas gymnasium shoes. She over-
took the man but she did not touch him, standing just be-
hind him, her hands rolled before her into the gray dress.

“Henry,” she said in a fiat voice. The man looked over
Jus shoulder.

“Get back to that wagon,” he said.

“Here, missus,” the Texan said. “Henry’s going to get
the bargain of his life in about a minute. Here, boys, let the
missus come up close where she can see. Henry’s going to

Spotted Horses 2 7

pick out that saddle-horse the missus has been wanting*
Who says ten

“Henry,” the woman said. She did not raise her voice.
She had not once looked at the Texan. She touched the
man’s arm. He turned and struck her hand down.

“Get back to that wagon like I told you." The woman
stood behind him, her hands rolled again into her dress.
She was not looking at anything, speaking to anyone.

“He aint no more despair than to buy one of them
things,” she said. “And us not but five dollars away from
the poorhouse, ha aint no more despair.” The man turned
upon her with that curious air of leashed, of dreamlike
fury. The others lounged along the fence in attitudes gravely
inattentive, almost oblivious. Mrs Littlejohn had been
washing for some time now, pumping rhythmically up and
down above the washboard in the sud-foamed tub. She
now stood erect again, her soap-raw hands on her hips,
looking into the lot.

“Shut your mouth and get back in that wagon,” the man
said. “Do you want me to take a wagon stake to you?” He
turned and looked up at the Texan. “Did you give him that
horse?” he said. The Texan was looking at the woman.
Then he looked at the man; still watching him, he tilted the
paper carton over his open palm. A single cake came out
of it.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is the fellow that bids in this next horse going to get
that first one too?”

“No,” the Texan said.

“All right,” the other said. “Are you going to give a
horse to the man that makes the first bid on the next one?”

“No,” the Texan said.

“Then if you were just starting the auction off by giving

28 WILLIAM FAULKNER

away a horse, why didn’t you wait till we were all here?”
The Texan stopped looking at the other. He raised the
empty carton and squinted carefully into it, as if it might
contain a precious jewel or perhaps a deadly insect Then
he crumpled it and dropped it carefully beside the post on
which he sat.

“Eck bids two dollars,” he said. “I believe he still thinks
he’s bidding on them scraps of bob-wire they come here in
instead of on one of the horses. But I got to accept it. But
are you boys ”

“So Eck’s going to get two horses at a dollar a head,” the
newcomer said. “Three dollars.” The woman touched him
again. He flung her hand off without turning and she stood
again, her hands rolled into her dress across her flat stom-
ach, not looking at anything.

“Misters,” she said, “we got chaps in the house that
never had shoes last winter. We aint got corn to feed the
stock. We got five dollars I earned weaving by firelight
after dark. And he aint no more despair.”

“Henry bids three dollars,” the Texan said. “Raise him a
dollar, Eck, and the horse is yours.” Beyond the fence the
horses rushed suddenly and for no reason and as suddenly
stopped, staring at the faces along the fence.

“Henry,” the woman said. The man was watching Eck.
His stained and broken teeth showed a little beneath his
lip. His wrists dangled into fists below the faded sleeves of
his shirt too short from many washings.

“Four dollars,” Eck said.

“Five dollars?” the husband said, raising one clenched
hand. He shouldered himself forward toward the gatepost
The woman did not follow him. She now looked at the
Texan for the first time. Her eyes were a washed gray also,
ns though they had faded too like the dress and the sun-
bonnet.

Spotted Horses 29

“Mister," she said, “if you take that five dollars T earned
my chaps a-weaving for one of them things, it’ll be a curse
on you and yours during all the time of man.”

“Five dollars!” the husband shouted. He thrust himself
up to the post, his clenched hand on a level with the
Texan’s knees. He opened it upon a wad of frayed bank*
notes and silver. “Five dollars! And the man that raises it
will have to beat my head off or I’ll beat hisn.”

“All right,” the Texan said. “Five dollars is bid. But
dont you shake your hand at me.”

At five oclock that afternoon the Texan crumpled tho
third paper carton and dropped it to the earth beneath him.
In the copper slant of the leveling sun which fell also upon
the line of limp garments in Mrs Littlejohn’s backyard and
which cast his shadow and that of the post on which he sat
long across the lot where now and then the ponies still
rushed in purposeless and tireless surges, the Texan
straightened his leg and thrust his hand into his pocket and
took out a coin and leaned down to the little boy. His voico
was now hoarse, spent. “Here, bud,” he said. “Run to the
store and get me a box of gingersnaps ” The men still stood
along the fence, tireless, in their overalls and faded shirts.
Flem Snopes was there now, appeared suddenly from no-
where, standing beside the fence with a space the width of
three or four men on either side of him, standing there in
his small yet definite isolation, chewing tobacco, in tho
same gray trousers and minute bow tie in which he had de-
parted last summer but in a new cap, gray too like tho
other, but new, and overlaid with a bright golfer’s plaid,
looking also at the horses in the lot AH of them save two
had been sold for sums ranging from three dollars and a
half to eleven and twelve dollars. The purchasers, as they
had bid them in, had gathered as though by instinct into a
separate group on the other side of the gate, where they

30 WILLIAM FAULKNER

stood with their hands lying upon the top strand of the
fence, watching with a still more sober Intensity the animals
which some of them had owned for seven and eight hours
now but had not yet laid hands upon. The husband, Henry,
stood beside the post on which the Texan sat The wife had
gone back to the wagon, where she sat gray in the gray
garment, motionless, looking at nothing still, she might
have been something inanimate which he had loaded into
the wagon to move it somewhere, waiting now in the wagon
until he should be ready to go on again, patient, insensate,
timeless.

“I bought a horse and I paid cash for it,” he said. His
Voice was harsh and spent too, the mad look in his eyes had
a quality glazed now and even sightless. “And yet you ex-
pect me to stand around here till they are all sold before I
can get my horse. Well, you can do all the expecting you
want I’m going to take my horse out of there and go
home.” The Texan looked down at him. The Texan’s shirt
was blotched with sweat. His big face was cold and still, his
voice level.

“Take your horse then.” After a moment Henry looked
away. He stood with his head bent a little, swallowing from
time to time.

“Aint you going to catch him for me?”

“It aint my horse,” the Texan said in that flat still voice.
After a while Henry raised his head. He did not look at the
Texan.

“Who’ll help me catch my horse?” he said* Nobody an-
swered. They stood along the fence, looking quietly into
the lot where the ponies huddled, already beginning to fade
a little where the long shadow of the house lay upon them,
deepening. From Mrs Littlejohn’s kitchen the smell of fry-
ing ham came. A noisy cloud of sparrows swept across the
lot and into a chinaberry tree beside the house, and in the

Spotted Horses 3 1

high soft vague blue swallows swooped and whirled in er-
ratic indecision* their cries like strings plucked at random.
Without looking back, Henry raised his voice: “Bring that
ere plowline." After a time the wife moved. She got down
from the wagon and took a coil of new cotton rope from it
and approached. The husband took the rope from her and
moved toward the gate. The Texan began to descend from
the post, stiffly, as Henry pr.t his hand on the latch. “Come
on here," he said. The wife had stopped when he took the
rope from her. She moved again, obediently, her hands
rolled into the dress across her stomach, passing the Texan
without looking at him.

“Dont go in there, missus," he said. She stopped, not
looking at him, not looking at anything. The husband
opened the gate and entered the lot and turned, holding the
gate open but without raising his eyes.

“Come on here,” he said.

€ T>ont you go in there, missus," the Texan said. The
wife stood motionless between them, her face almost con-
cealed by the sunbonnct, her hands folded across her
stomach.

“I reckon I better," she said. The other men did not look
at her at all, at her or Henry either. They stood along the
fence, grave and quiet and inattentive, almost bemused.
Then the wife passed through the gate; the husband shut it
behind them and turned and began to move toward the
huddled ponies, the wife following in the gray and shape*
less garment within which she moved without inference of
locomotion, like something on a moving platform, a float.
The horses were watching them. They clotted and blended
and shifted among themselves, on die point of breaking
though not breaking yet. The husband shouted at them. He
began to curse them, advancing, the wife following. Then
the huddle broke, the animals moving with high, stiff knees.

32 "WILLIAM FAULKNER

circling the two people who turned and followed again as
the herd flowed and huddled again at the opposite side of
the lot

“There he is," the husband said. “Get him into that
comer." The herd divided; the horse which the husband
had bought jolted on stiff legs. The wife shouted at it; it
spun and poised, plunging, then the husband struck it
across the face with the coiled rope and it whirled and
slammed into the comer of the fence. “Keep him there
now," the husband said. He shook out the rope, advancing.
The horse watched him with wild, glaring eyes; it rushed
again, straight toward the wife. She shouted at it and waved
her anus but it soared past her in a long bound and rushed
again into the huddle of its fellows. They followed and
hemmed it again into another comer; again the wife failed
to stop its rush for freedom and the husband turned and
struck her with the coiled rope. “Why didn’t you head
him?” he said, “Why didn’t you?” He struck her again; she
did not move, not even to fend the rope with a raised aim.
The men along the fence stood quietly, their faces lowered
as though brooding upon the earth at their feet Only Flem
Snopes was still watching — if he ever had been looking
into the lot at all, standing in his little island of isolation,
chewing with his characteristic faint sidewise thrust be-
neath the new plaid cap.

The Texan said something, not loud, harsh and short He
entered the lot and went to the husband and jerked the up-
lifted rope from his hand. The husband whirled as though
he were about to spring at the Texan, crouched slightly, his
knees bent and his arms held slightly away from his sides,
though his gaze never mounted higher than the Texan’s
carved and dusty boots. Then the Texan took the husband
by the arm and led him back toward the gate, the wife fol-
lowing, and through the gate which he held open for the

Spotted Horses 33

woman and then closed. He took a wad of banknotes from
his trousers and removed a bill from it and put it into the
woman’s hand. “Get him into the wagon and get him on
home,” he said.

“What’s that for?” Flem Snopes said. He had ap-
proached. He now stood beside the post on which tho
Texan had been sitting. The Texan did not look at him.

“Thinks he bought one of them ponies,” the Texan said.
He spoke in a flat still voice, like that of a man after A
sharp run. “Get him on away, missus.”

“Give him back that money,” the husband said, in his
lifeless, spent tone. “I bought that horse and I aim to have
him if I got to shoot him before I can put a rope on him.*
The Texan did not even look at him.

“Get him on away from here, missus,” he said.

“You take your money and I take my horse,” the hus-
band said. He was shaking slowly and steadily now, as
though he were cold. His hands opened and shut below tho
frayed cuffs of his shirt “Give it back to him,” he said.

“You dont own no horse of mine,” the Texan said. “Get
him on home, missus.” The husband raised his spent face,
his mad glazed eyes. He reached out his hand. The woman
held the banknote in her folded hands across her stomach.
For a while the husband’s shaking hand merely fumbled at
it. Then he drew the banknote free.

“It’s my horse,” he said. “I bought it. These fellows saw
me. I paid for it It’s my horse. Here.” He turned and ex-
tended the banknote toward Snopes. “You got something
to do with these horses. I bought one. Here’s the money for
it I bought one. Ask him.” Snopes took the banknote. Tho
others stood, gravely inattentive, in relaxed attitudes along
the fence. The sun had gone now; there was nothing save
violet shadow upon them and upon the lot where onco
more and for no reason the ponies rushed and flowed. At

34 WILLIAM FAULKNER

that moment the little boy came up, tireless and indefat-
igable still, with the new paper carton. The Texan took it,
though he did not open it at once. He had dropped the rope
and now the husband stooped for it, fumbling at it for
some time before he lifted it from the ground. Then he
stood with his head bent, his knuckles whitening on the
rope. The woman had not moved. Twilight was coming fast
now; there was a last mazy swirl of swallows against the
high and changing azure. Then the Texan tore the end
from the carton and tilted one of the cakes into his hand;
he seemed to be watching the hand as it shut slowly upon
the cake until a fine powder of snuff-colored dust began to
rain from his fingers. He rubbed the hand carefully on his
thigh and raised his head and glanced about until he saw
the little boy and handed the carton back to him,

‘'Here, bud,'* he said. Then he looked at the woman, his
voice flat, quiet again. “Mr. Snopes will have your money
for you tomorrow. Better get him in the wagon and get him
on home. He dont own no horse. You can get your money
tomorrow from Mr Snopes.” The wile turned and went
back to the wagon and got Into it. No one watched her, nor
the husband who still stood, his head bent, passing the rope
from one hand to the other. They leaned along the fence,
grave and quiet, as though the fence were in another land,
another time.

“How many you got left?” Snopes said. The Texan
roused; they all seemed to rouse then, returning, listening
again.

“Got three now,” the Texan said. “Swap all three of
them for a buggy or a ”

“It’s out in the road,” Snopes said, a little shortly, a little
quickly, turning away. “Get your mules.” He went on up
the lane. They watched the Texan enter the lot and cross
it, the horses flowing before him but without the old irra*

Spotted Horses 3 5

tional violence, as if they too were spent, vitiated with the
long day, and enter the bam and then emerge, leading the
two harnessed mules. The wagon had been backed under
the shed beside the bam. The Texan entered this and came
out a moment later, carrying a bedding-roll and his coat,
and led the mules back toward die gate, the ponies huddled
again and watching him with their various unmatching
eyes, quietly now, as if they too realised there was not only
an armistice between them at last but that they would never
look upon each other again in both their lives. Someone
opened the gate. The Texan led the mules through it and
they followed in a body, leaving the husband standing be-
side the closed gate, his head still bent and the coiled rope
in his hand. They passed the wagon in which the wife sat,
her gray garment fading into the dusk, almost the same
color and as still, looking at nothing; they passed the
clothesline with its limp and unwinded drying garments,
walking through the hot vivid smell of ham from Mrs
Littlejohn’s kitchen. When they reached the end of the lane
they could see the moon, almost full, tremendous and pale
and sdll lightless in the sky from which day had not quite
gone. Snopes was standing at the end of the lane beside an
empty buggy. It was the one with the glittering wheels and
the fringed parasol top in which he and Will Varner had
used to drive. The Texan was motionless too, looking at it

"WeD wen well,” he said. “So this is it”

"If it dont suit you, you can ride one of the mules back
to Texas,” Snopes said.

"You bet,” the Texan said. "Only I ought to have a
powder puff or at least a mandolin to ride it with.” He
backed the mules onto the tongue and lifted the breast-
yoke. Two of them came forward and fastened the traces
for him. Then they watched him get into the buggy and
raise the reins.

36 WILLIAM FAULKNER

“Where you heading for?” one said. “Back to Texas?”

“In this?” the Texan said. “I wouldn’t get past the first
Texas saloon without starting the vigilance committee. Be-
sides, I aint going to waste all this here lace-trimmed top
and these spindle wheels just on Texas. Long as I am this
far, I reckon I’ll go on a day or two and look-see them
Northern towns. Washington and New York and Balti-
more. What’s the short way to New York from here?”
They didn’t know. But they told him how to reach Jeffer-
son.

“You’re already headed right,” Freeman said. “Just
Jceep right on up the road past the schoolhouse.”

* “All right,” the Texan said. “Well, remember about
busting them ponies over the head now and then until they
get used to you. You wont have any trouble with them
then.” He lifted the reins again. As he did so Snopes
stepped forward and got into the buggy.

“I’ll ride as far as Varner’s with you,” he said.

“I didn’t know I was going past Vamer’s,” the Texan
said.

“You can go to town that way,” Snopes said. “Drive
on.” The Texan shook the reins. Then he said,

“Whoa.” He straightened his leg and put his hand into
his pocket. “Here, bud,” he said to the little boy, “run to
the store and — Never mind. I'll stop and get it myself,
long as 1 am going back that way. Well, boys,” he said.
“Take care of yourselves.” He swung the team around.
The buggy went on. They looked after it.

“I reckon he aims to kind of come up on Jefferson from
behind,” Quick said.

“He’ll be lighter when he gets there,” Freeman said.
“He can come up to it easy from any side he wants.”

“Yes,” Bookwright said. “His pockets wont rattle.”
They went back to the lot; they passed on through the

Spotted Horses 3 7

narrow way between the two lines of patient and motion-
less wagons, which at the end was completely closed by the
one in which the woman sat The husband was still stand-
ing beside the gate with his coiled rope, and now night had
completely come. The light itself had not changed so much;
if anything, it was brighter but with that other-worldly
quality of moonlight so that when they stood once more
looking into the lot, the splotchy bodies of the ponies had
a distinctness, almost a brilliance, but without individual
shape and without depth — no longer horses, no longer flesh
and bone directed by a principle capable of calculated
violence, no longer inherent with the capacity to hurt and
harm.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” Freeman said. “For
them to go to roost?”

“We better all get our ropes first,” Quick said. “Get your
ropes, everybody.” Some of them did not have ropes. When
they left home that morning, they had not heard about the
horses, the auction. They had merely happened through the
village by chance and learned of it and stopped.

“Go to the store and get some then,” Freeman said.

“The store will be closed now,” Quick said.

“No it wont,” Freeman said. “If it was closed. Lump
Snopes would a been up here.” So while the ones who had
come prepared got their ropes from the wagons, the others
went down to the store. The clerk was just closing it

“You all aint started catching them yet, have you?” ho
said. “Good; I was afraid I wouldn’t get there in time.” He
opened the door again and amid the old strong sunless
smells of cheese and leather and molasses he measured and
cut off sections of plowline for them and in a body and the
clerk in the center and still talking, voluble and unlistened
to, they returned up the road. The pear tree before Mrs
Littlejohn’s was like drowned silver now in the moon. The

38 WILLIAM FAULKNER

mocldngblrd of last night, or another one, was already
singing in it, and they now saw, tied to die fence, Ratliffs
buckboard and team*

"I thought something was wrong all day," one said
"Ratliff wasn’t there to give nobody advice." When they
passed down the lane, Mrs Littlejohn was in her backyard,
gathering the garments from the clothesline; they could
still smell the ham. The others were waiting at the gate, be-
yond which the ponies, huddled again, were like phantom
fish, suspended apparently without legs now in the bril-
liant treachery of the moon.

"I reckon the best way will be for ns all to take and
catch them one at a time," Freeman said

"One at a time," the husband, Henry, said Apparently
he had not moved since the Texan had led his mules
through the gate, save to lift his hands to the top of the
gate, one of them still clutching the coiled rope. “One at a
time," he said He began to curse in a harsh, spent mono-
tone. "After I’ve stood around here all day, waiting for
that — " He cursed. He began to jerk at the gate, shaking
it with spent violence until one of the others slid the latch
back and it swung open and Henry entered it, the others
following, the little boy pressing close behind his father un-
til Eck became aware of him and turned

"Here,” he said "Give mo that rope. You stay out of
here."

"Aw, paw," the boy said

• "No, sir. Them things will kill you. They almost done it
this morning. You stay out of here.”

"But we got two to catch." For a moment Eck stood
looking down at the boy.

"That’s right," he said "We got two. But you stay dose
to me now. And when I holler ran, you run. You hear me?"

"Spread out, boys," Freeman said "Keep them in front

Spotted Horses 39

of us." They began to advance across the lot in a ragged
crescent-shaped line, each one with his rope. The ponies
were now at the far side of the lot One of them snorted;
the mass shifted within itself but without breaking. Free-
man, glancing back, saw the little boy. “Get that boy out
of here," he said.

“I reckon you better," Eck said to the boy. “You go and
get in the wagon yonder. You can see us catch them from
there.” The little boy turned and trotted toward the shed
beneath which the wagon stood. The line of men advanced,
Henry a little in front

“Watch them close now,” Freeman said. “Maybe wo
better try to get them into the bam first — ” At that mo-
ment the huddle broke. It parted and flowed in both direc-
tions along the fence. The men at the ends of the line be-
gan to run, waving their arms and shouting. “Head them,”
Freeman said tensely. “Turn them back.” They turned
them, driving them back upon themselves again; the ani-
mals merged and spun in short, huddling rushes, phantom
and inextricable. “Hold them now,” Freeman said. “Dont
let them get by us.” The line advanced again. Eck turned;
he did not know why — whether a sound, what The littlo
boy was just behind him again.

“Didn’t I tell you to get in that wagon and stay there?”
Eck said.

“Watch out, paw!” the boy said. “There he is! There’s
oumP It was the one the Texan had given Eck. “Catch
him, paw!”

“Get out of my way,” Eck said. “Get back to that
wagon.” The line was still advancing. Ihe ponies milled,
dotting, forced gradually backward toward the open door
of the bam. Henry was still slightly in front, crouched
slightly, his thin figure, even in the mazy moonlight, ema-
nating something of that spent fury. The splotchy huddle of

40 WILLIAM FAULKNER

animals seemed to be moving before the advancing line of
men like a snowball which they might have been pushing
before them by some invisible means, gradually nearer and
nearer to the black yawn of the bam door Later it was
obvious that the ponies were so intent upon the men that
they did not realise the bam was even behind them until
they backed into the shadow of it Then an indescribable
sound, a movement desperate and despairing, arose among
them; for an instant of static horror men and animals faced
one another, then the men whirled and ran before a gaudy
vomit of long wild faces and splotched chests which over-
took and scattered them and hung them sprawling aside
and completely obliterated from sight Henry and the little
boy, neither of whom had moved though Henry had flung
up both arms, still holding his coiled rope, the herd sweep-
ing on across the lot, to crash through the gate which the
last man through it had neglected to close, leaving it slightly
ajar, carrying all of the gate save upright to which the
binges were nailed with them, and so among the teams and
wagons which choked the lane, the teams springing and
lunging too, snapping hitch-reins and tongues. Then the
whole inextricable mass crashed among the wagons and
eddied and divided about the one in which the woman sat,
and rushed on down the lane and into the road, dividing,
one half going one way and one half the other*

The men in the lot, except Henry, got to their feet and
ran toward the gate* The little boy once more had not been
touched, not even thrown off his feet; for awhile his fattier
held him dear of the ground in one hand, shaking him like
a rag dolL “Didn’t I tell you to stay in that wagon?” Eck
cried. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“Look out, paw!” the boy chattered out of the violent
shaking. “There’s ouml There he goes!” It was the horse
the Texan had given them again. It was as if they owned

Spotted Horses 41

no other, the other one did not exist; as if by some absolute
and instantaneous rapport of blood they had relegated to
oblivion the one for which they had paid money. They ran
to the gate and down the lane where the other men had
disappeared. They saw the horse the Texan had given them
whirl and dash back and rush through the gate into Mrs
Littlejohn’s yard and run up the front steps and crash
once on the wooden veranda and vanish through the front
door. Eck and the boy ran up onto the veranda. A lamp
sat on a table just inside the door. In its mellow light they
saw the horse fill the long hallway like a pinwhcel, gaudy,
furious and thunderous. A little further down the hall there
was a varnished yellow melodeon. The horse crashed into
it; it produced a single note, almost a chord, in bass,
resonant and grave, of deep and sober astonishment; the
horse with its monstrous and antic shadow whirled again
and vanished through another door. It was a bedroom;
Ratliif, in his underclothes and one sock and with the other
sock in his hand and his back to the door, was leaning out
the open window facing the lane, the lot. He looked back
over his shoulder. For an instant he and the horse glared at
one another. Then he sprang through the window as the
horse backed out of the room and into the hall again and
whirled and saw Eck and the little boy just entering the
front door, Eck still carrying his rope. It whirled again and
rushed on down the hall and onto the back porch just as
Mrs Littlejohn, carrying an armful of clothes from the line
and the washboard, mounted the steps.

“Get out of here, you son of a bitch/* she said. She
struck with the washboard; it divided neatly on the long
mad face and the horse whirled and rushed back up the
hall, where Eck and the boy now stood.

“Get to hell out of here. Wall!” Eck roared. He dropped
to the floor, covering his head with his arms. The boy did

42 WILLIAM FAULKNER

not move, and for the third time the horse soared above
the unwinking eyes and the unbowed and untouched head
and onto the front veranda again just as Ratliff, still cany*
mg the sock, ran around the comer of the house and up
the steps. The horse whirled without breaking or pausing.
It galloped to the end of the veranda and took the railing
and soared outward, hobgoblin and floating, in the moon.
It landed in the lot still running and crossed the lot and
galloped through the wrecked gate and among the over-
turned wagons and the still intact one in which Henry’s wife
still sat, and on down the lane and into the road.

A quarter of a mile further on, the road gashed pallid
and moony between the moony shadows of the bordering
trees, the horse still galloping, galloping its shadow into the
dust, the road descending now toward the creek and the
bridge. It was of wood, just wide enough for a single
vehicle. When the horse reached it, it was occupied by a
wagon coming from the opposite direction and drawn by
two mules already asleep in the harness and the soporific
motion. On the seat were Tull and his wife, in splint chairs
in the wagon behind them sat their four daughters, all re-
turning belated from an all-day visit with some of Mrs
Tull’s kin. The horse neither checked nor swerved. It
crashed once on the wooden bridge and rushed between
the two mules which waked lunging in opposite directions
in the traces, the horse now apparently scrambling along
the wagon-tongue itself like a mad squirrel and scrabbling
at the end-gate of the wagon with its forefeet as if it in-
tended to climb into the wagon while Tull shouted at it
and struck at its face with his whip. The mules were now
trying to turn the wagon around in the middle of the bridge.
It slewed and tilted, the bridge-rail cracked with a sharp
report above the shrieks of the women; the horse scram-
bled at last across the back of one of the mules and TuU

Spotted Horses 43

stood up in the wagon and kicked at its face. Then the
front end of the wagon rose, flinging Tull, the reins now
wrapped several times about his wrist, backward into the
wagon bed among the overturned chairs and the exposed
stockings and undergarments of his women. The pony
scrambled free and crashed again on the wooden planking,
galloping again. The wagon lurched again; the mules had
finally turned it on the bridge where there was not room for
it to turn and were now kicking themselves free of the
traces. When they came free, they snatched Tull bodily out
of the wagon. He struck the bridge on his face and was
dragged for several feet before the wrist-wrapped reins
broke. Far up the road now, distancing the frantic mules,
the pony faded on. While the five women still shrieked
above Tull's unconscious body, Bek and the little boy
came up, trotting, Eck still carrying his rope. He was pant-
ing. “Which way’d he go?” he said.

In the now empty and moon-drenched lot, his wife and
Mrs Littlejohn and Ratliff and Lump Snopes, the clerk, and
three other men raised Henry out of the trampled dust and
carried him into Mrs Littlejohn’s backyard. His face was
blanched and stony, his eyes were closed, the weight of
his head tautened his throat across the protruding larynx;
his teeth glinted dully beneath his lifted lip. They carried
him on toward the house, through the dappled shade of the
chinaberry trees. Across the dreaming and silver night a
faint sound like remote thunder came and ceased. “There's
one of them on the creek bridge,” one of the men said.

“It’s that one of Eck Snopes’s,” another said. “The one
that was in the house.” Mrs Littlejohn had preceded them
into the halL When they entered with Henry, she had al-
ready taken the lamp from the table and she stood beside
an open door, holding the lamp high.

“Bring him in here,” she said. She entered the room first

44 WILLIAM FAULKNER

and set the lamp on the dresser. They followed with clumsy
scufEings and pantings and laid Henry on the bed and Mrs
Littlejohn came to the bed and stood looking down at
Hemy’s peaceful and bloodless face. “Ill declare,” she
said. “You men.” They had drawn back a little, clumped,
shifting from one foot to another, not looking at her nor
at his wife either, who stood at the foot of the bed, motion-
less, her hands folded into her dress. “You all get out of
here, V. K.,” she said to Ratliff. “Go outside. See if you
cant find something else to play with that will kill some
more of you.”

“All right,” Ratliff said. “Come on, boys. Aint no more
horses to catch in here.” They followed him toward the
door, on tiptoe, their shoes scuffling, their shadows mon-
strous on the wall.

“Go get Will Varner,” Mrs Littlejohn said. “I reckon
you can tell him it’s still a mule.” They went out; they
didn’t look back. They tiptoed up the hall and crossed the
veranda and descended into the moonlight Now that they
could pay attention to it, the silver air seemed to be filled
with faint and sourceless sounds — shouts, thin and distant,
again a brief thunder of hooves on a wooden bridge, more
shouts faint and thin and earnest and clear as bells; once
they even distinguished the words: “Whooey. Head him.”

“He went through that house quick,” Ratliff said. “He
must have found another woman at home.” Then Henry
screamed in the house behind them. They looked back into
the dark hall where a square of light fell through the bed-
room door, listening while the scream sank into a harsh
respiration: “Ah. Ah. Ah” on a rising note about to be-
come screaming again. “Come on,” Ratliff said. “We better
get Varner.” They went up the road in a body, treading
the moon-blanched dust in the tremulous April night mur-

Spotted Horses 45

murous with the moving of sap and the wet bursting of
burgeoning leaf and bud and constant with the thin and
urgent cries and the brief and fading bursts of galloping
hooves. Varner’s house was dark, blank and without depth
in the moonlight They stood, clumped darkly in the silver
yard, and called up at the blank windows until suddenly
someone was standing in one of them. It was Hem Snopes’s
wife. She was in a white garment; the heavy braided club
of her hair looked almost black against it She did not
lean out, she merely stood there, full in the moon, ap-
parently blank-eyed or certainly not looking downward at
them — the heavy gold hair, the mask not tragic and per-
haps not even doomed: just damned, the strong faint lift
of breasts beneath marblclike fall of the garment; to those
below what Brunhilde, what Rhinemaiden on what spuri-
ous river-rock of papier-mach<$, what Helen returned to
what topless and shoddy Argos, waiting for no one. “Eve-
ning, Mrs Snopes,” Ratliff said. “We want Uncle Will.
Henry Armstid is hurt at Mrs Littlejohn’s.” She vanished
from the window. They waited in the moonlight, listening
to the faint remote shouts and cries, until Varner emerged,
sooner than they had actually expected, hunching into his
coat and buttoning his trousers over the tail of his night-
shirt, his suspenders still dangling in twin loops below the
coat. He was carrying the battered bag which contained
the plumber-like tools with which he drenched and wormed
and blistered and floated or drew the teeth of horses and
mules; he came down the steps, lean and loose-jointed, his
shrewd ruthless head cocked a little as he listened also to
the faint bcll-like cries and shouts with which the silver air
was full.

“Are they still trying to catch them rabbits?” he said.

“All of them except Henry Armstid,” Ratliff said. “He
caught his.”

4* WILLIAM FAULKNER

“Hah,” Varner said, “That you, V. K.? How many did
you buy?”

“I was too late,” Ratliff said. “I never got back in time.”

“Hah,” Varner said. They moved on to the gate and into
the road again. “Well, it’s a good bright cool night for run-
ning them.” The moon was now high overhead, a pearled
and mazy yawn in the soft sky, the ultimate ends of which
rolled onward, whorl on whorl, beyond the pale stars and
by pale stars surrounded. They walked in a close clump*
tramping their shadows into the road’s mild dust, blotting
the shadows of the burgeoning trees which soared, trunk
branch and twig against the pale sky, delicate and finely
thinned. They passed the dark store. Then the pear tree
came in sight It rose in mazed and silver immobility like
exploding snow; the mockingbird still sang in it. “Look at
that tree,” Varner said. “It ought to make this year, sho.”

“Corn’ll make this year too,” one said.

“A moon like this is good for every growing thing outen
earth,” Varner said. “I mind when me and Mrs Varner
was expecting Eula. Already had a mess of children and
maybe we ought to quit then. But I wanted some more gals.
Others had done married and moved away, and a passel
of boys, soon as they get big enough to be worth anything,
they aint got time to work. Got to set around store and talk.
But a gal will stay home and work until she does get mai>
ried. So there was a old woman told my mammy once that
if a woman showed her belly to the full moon after she had
done caught, it would be a gal. So Mrs Varner taken and
laid every night with the moon on her nekid belly, until it
fulled and after. I could lay my ear to her belly and hear
Eula kicking and scrouging like all get-out, feeling the
moon.”

“You mean it actually worked sho enough. Uncle Will?”
the other said.

Spotted Horses 47

“Hah,” Varner said. “You might try it. You get enough
women showing their nekid bellies to the moon or the sun
either or even just to your hand fumbling around often
enough and more than likely after a while there will be
something in it you can lay your ear and listen to, provided
something come up and you aint got away by that time.
Hah, V. K.?” Someone guffawed.

“Dont ask me,” Ratliff said. “I cant even get nowhere in
time to buy a cheap horse." Two or three guffawed this
time. Then they began to hear Henry’s respirations from
the house: “Ah. Ah. Ah” and they ceased abruptly, as if
they had not been aware of their closeness to it. Varner
walked on in front, lean, shambling, yet moving quit©
rapidly, though his head was still slanted with listening as
the faint, urgent, indomitable cries murmured in the silver
lambence, sourccless, at times almost musical, like fading
bell-notes; again there was a brief rapid thunder of hooves
on wooden planking.

“There’s another one on the creek bridge,” one said.

“They are going to come out even on them things, after
all,” Varner said. “They’ll get the money back in exercise
and relaxation. You take a man that aint got no other re-
laxation all year long except dodging mule-dung up and
down a field furrow. And a night like this one, when a man
aint old enough yet to lay still and sleep, and yet he aint
young enough any more to be tomcatting in and out of
other folks’ back windows, something like this is good for
him. It’ll make him sleep tomorrow night anyhow, provided
he gets back home by then. If we had just knowed about
this in time, we could have trained up a pack of horse-dogs*
Then we could have held one of these field trials.”

“That’s one way to look at it, I reckon,” Ratliff said. “In
fact, it might be a considerable comfort to Bookwright and
Quick and Freeman and Eck Snopes and them other new

48 WILLIAM FAULKNER

horse-owners if that side of it could be brought to their at*
tention, because the chances are aint none of them thought
to look at it in that light yet Probably there aint a one of
them that believes now there's any cure a tall for that Texas
disease Hem Snopes and that Dead-eye Dick brought
here.”

‘‘Hah/* Varner said. He opened Mrs Littlejohn’s gate.
The dim light still fell outward across the hall from the bed*
loom door; beyond it Armstid was saying “Ah. Ah. Ail”
steadily. “There’s a pill for every ill but the last one.”

“Even if there was always time to take it” Ratliff said.

“Hall,” Varner said again. He glanced back at Ratliff
for an instant, pausing. But the little hard bright eyes were
invisible now; it was only the bushy overhang of the brows
which seemed to concentrate downward toward him in
writhen immobility, not frowning but with a sort of fierce
risibility. “Even if there was time to take it Breathing is a
sight-draft dated yesterday.”

At nine oclock on the second morning after that, five
men were sitting or squatting along the gallery of the store.
The sixth was Ratliff. He was standing up, and talking:
“Maybe there wasn’t but one of them things in Mrs Little-
john’s house that night, like Eck says. But it was the big-
gest drove of just one horse I ever seen. It was in my room
and it was on the front porch and I could hear Mrs Little-
john hitting it over the head with that washboard in the
backyard all at the same time. And still it was missing
everybody every time. I reckon that’s what that Texas man
meant by calling them bargains: that a man would need to
be powerful unlucky to ever get close enough to one of
them to get hurt.” They laughed, all except Eck himself.
He and the little boy were eating. When they mounted the
steps, Eck had gone on into the store and emerged with a
paper sack, from which he took a segment of cheese and

Spotted Horses 49

with his pocket knife divided it carefully into two exact
halves and gave one to the boy and took a handful of
crackers from the sack and gave them to the boy, and now
they squatted against the wall, side by side and, save for
the difference in size, identical, eating.

“I wonder what that horse thought Ratliff was,” one
said. He held a spray of peach bloom between his teeth. It
bore four blossoms like miniature ballet skirts of pink tulle.
“Jumping out windows and running indoors in his shirt-
tail? I wonder how many Ratliffs that horse thought he
saw.”

“I dont know,” Ratliff said. “But if he saw just half as
many of me as I saw of him, he was sholy surrounded.
Every time I turned my head, that thing was just running
over me or just swirling to run back over that boy again.
And that boy there, he stayed right under it one time to my
certain knowledge for a full one-and-one-half minutes with-
out ducking his head or even batting his eyes. Yes, sir, when
I looked around and seen that varmint in the door behind
me blaring its eyes at me, I’d a made sho Flem Snopes had
brought a tiger back from Texas except I knowed that
couldn’t no just one tiger completely fill a entire room.”
They laughed again, quietly. Lump Snopes, the clerk, sit-
ting in the only chair tilted back against the door-facing
and partly blocking the entrance, cackled suddenly.

“If Hem had knowed how quick you fellows was going
to snap them horses up, he’d a probably brought soma
tigers,” he said. “Monkeys too.”

“So they was Hem’s horses,” Ratliff said. The laughter
stopped. The other three had open knives in their hands,
with which they had been trimming idly at chips and slivers
of wood. Now they sat apparently absorbed in the delicate
and almost tedious movements of the knife-blades. The
clerk had looked quickly up and found Ratliff watching him.

50 WILLIAM FAULKNER

His constant expression of incorrigible and mirthful disbe-
lief had left him now; only the empty wrinkles of it re-
mained about his mouth and eyes.

“Has Flem ever said they was?” he said. “But you town
fellows are smarter than us country folks. Likely you done
already read Flem’s mind.” But Ratlilf was not looking at
him now.

“And I reckon we’d a bought them,” he said. He stood
above them again, easy, intelligent, perhaps a little sombre
but still perfectly impenetrable. “Eck here, for instance.
With a wife and family to support. He owns two of them,
though to be sho he never had to pay money for but one. I
heard folks chasing them things up until midnight last
night, but Eck and that boy aint been home a tall in two
■days.” They laughed again, except Eck. He pared off a bit
of cheese and speared it on the knife-point and put it into
his mouth.

“Eck caught one of hisn,” the second man said.

“That so?” Ratliff said. “Which one was it, Eck? The
one he give you or the one you bought?”

“The one he give me,” Eck said, chewing.

“Well, well,” Ratliff said. “I hadn’t heard abont that But
Eck’s still one horse short. And the one he had to pay
money for. Which is pure proof enough that them horses
wasn’t Flem’s because wouldn’t no man even give his own
blood kin something he couldn’t even catch.” They laughed
again, but they stopped when the clerk spoke. There was
no mirth in his voice at all.

“Listen,” he said. “All right We done all admitted you
are too smart for anybody to get ahead of. You never
bought no horse from Flem or nobody else, so maybe it
aint none of your business and maybe you better just leave
it at that”

“Sholy,” Ratliff said. “It’s done already been left at that

Spotted Horses y x

two nights ago. The fellow that forgot to shut that lot gate
done that. With the exception of Eck’s horse. And we know
that wasn’t Flem’s, because that horse was give to Eck for
nothing.”

“There’s others besides Eck that aint got back home
yet,” the man with the peach spray said. “Bookwright and
Quick are still chasing theirs. They was reported three
miles west of Burtsboro Old Town at eight oclock last
night They aint got close enough to it yet to tell which one
it belongs to.”

“Sholy,” Ratliff said. “The only new horse-owner in
this country that could a been found without bloodhounds
since whoever it was left that gate open two nights ago, is
Henry Armstid. He’s laying right there in Mrs Littlejohn’s
bedroom where he can watch the lot so that any time the
one he bought happens to run back into it, all he’s got to do
is to holler at his wife to run out with the rope and catch
it — >” He ceased, though he said, “Morning, Flem,” so im-
mediately afterward and with no change whatever in tone,
that the pause was not even discernible. With the excep-
tion of the clerk, who sprang up, vacated the chair with a
sort of servile alacrity, and Eck and the little boy who con-
tinued to eat, they watched above their stilled hands as
Snopes in the gray trousers and the minute tie and the new
cap with its bright overplaid mounted the steps. He was
chewing; he already carried a piece of white pine board; ho
jerked his head at them, looking at nobody, and took the
Vacated chair and opened his knife and began to whittle.
The clerk now leaned in the opposite side of the door, rub-
bing his back against the facing. The expression of merry
and invincible disbelief had returned to his face, with a
quality watchful and secret

“You’re just in time,” he said. “Ratliff here seems to
be in a considerable sweat about who actually owned them

5 2 WILLIAM FAULKNER

horses.” Snopes drew his knife-blade neatly along the
board, the neat, surgeon-like sliver curling before it. The
others were whittling again, looking carefully at nothing,
except Eck and the boy, who were still eating, and the
clerk rubbing his back against the door-facing and watch-
ing Snopes with that secret and alert intensity. “Maybe you
could put his mind at rest ” Snopes turned his head slightly
and spat, across the gallery and the steps and into die dust
beyond them. He drew the knife back and began another
curling sliver.

“He was there too,” Snopes said. “He knows as much as
anybody else.” This time the clerk guffawed, chortling, his
features gathering toward the center of his face as though
plucked there by a hand. He slapped his leg, cackling.

“You might as well to quit,” he said. “You cant beat
him.”

“I reckon not,” Ratliff said. He stood above them, not
looking at any of them, his gaze fixed apparently on the
empty road beyond Mrs Littlejohn’s house, impenetrable,
brooding even. A hulking, half-grown boy in overalls too
small for him appeared suddenly from nowhere in par-
ticular. He stood for a while in the road, just beyond spit-
ting-range of the gallery, with the air of having come from
nowhere in particular and of not knowing where he would
go next when he should move again and of not being
troubled by that fact. He was looking at nothing, certainly
not toward the gallery, and no one on the gallery so much
as looked at him except the little boy, who now watched
the boy in the road, his periwinkle eyes grave and steady
above the bitten cracker in his halted hand. The boy in
the road moved on, thickly undulant in the tight overalls,
and vanished beyond the corner of the store, the round
head and the unwinking eyes of the little boy on the gallery
turning steadily to watch him out of sight Then the little

Spotted Horses 5 3

boy bit the cracker again, chewing. “Of course there’s Mrs
Tull,” Ratliff said. “But that’s Eck she’s going to sue for
damaging Tull against that bridge. And as lor Henry
Annstid ”

“If a man aint got gumption enough to protect himself,
it’s his own look-out,” the clerk said.

“Sholy,” Ratliff said, still in that dreamy, abstracted
tone, actually speaking over his shoulder even. “And
Henry Armstid, that’s all right because from what I hear of
the conversation that taken place, Henry had already
stopped owning that horse he thought was his before that
Texas man left And as for that broke leg, that wont put
him out none because his wife can make his crop.” The
clerk had ceased to rub his back against the door. He
watched the back of Ratliffs head, unwinking too, sober
and intent; he glanced at Snopes who, chewing, was watch-
ing another sliver curl away from the advancing knife-
blade, then he watched the back of Ratliff’s head again.

“It wont be the first time she has made their crop,” the
man with the peach spray said. Ratliff glanced at him.

“You ought to know. This wont be the first time I ever
saw you in their field, doing plowing Henry never got
around to. How many days have you already given them
this year?” The man with the peach spray removed it and
spat carefully and put the spray back between his teeth.

“She can run a furrow straight as I can,” the second said.

“They’re unlucky,” the third said. “When you are un-
lucky, it dont matter much what you do.”

“Sholy,” Ratliff said. “I’ve heard laziness called bad luck
so much that maybe it is.”

“He aint lazy,” the third said. “When their mule died
three or four years ago, him and her broke their land work-
ing time about in the traces with the other mule. They aint
lazy.”

WILLIAM FAULKNER

54

“So that’s all right,” Ratliff said, gazing up the empty
road again. “Likely she will begin right away to finish the
plowing; that oldest gal is pretty near big enough to work
with a mule, aint she? or at least to hold the plow steady
while Mrs. Armstid helps the mule?” He glanced again
toward the man with the peach spray as though for an an-
swer but he was not looking at tho other and he went on
talking without any pause. The clerk stood with his rump
and back pressed against the door-facing as if he had
paused in the act of scratching, watching Ratliff quite hard
now, unwinking. If Ratliff had looked at Flem Snopes, he
would have seen nothing below the down-slanted peak of
the cap save the steady motion of his jaws. Another sliver
was curling with neat deliberation before the moving knife.
“Plenty of time now because all she’s got to do after she
finishes washing Mrs Littlejohn’s dishes and sweeping out
the house to pay hers and Henry’s board, is to go out home
and milk and cook up enough vittles to last the children
until tomorrow and feed them and get the littlest ones to
sleep and wait outside the door until that biggest gal gets
the bar up and gets into bed herself with the axe ”

“The axe?” the man with the peach spray said.

“She takes it to bed with her. She’s just twelve, and what
with this country still more or less full of them uncaught
horses that never belonged to Flem Snopes, likely she
feels maybe she cant swing a mere washboard like Mrs
Littlejohn can — and then come back and wash up the sup-
per dishes. And after that, not nothing to do until morn-
ing except to stay close enough where Henry can call her
until it’s light enough to chop the wood to cook breakfast
and then help Mrs Littlejohn wash the dishes and make
the beds and sweep while watching the road. Because likely
any time now Flem Snopes will get back from wherever he
has been since the auction, which of course is to town

Spotted Horses 55

naturally to see about his cousin that’s got into a little
legal trouble, and so get that five dollars. ‘Only maybe he
wont give it back to me,’ she says, and maybe that’s what
Mrs Littlejohn thought too, because she never said nothing.
I could hear her ”

“And where did you happen to be during all this?” the
clerk said.

“Listening,” Ratlifi said. He glanced back at the clerk,
then he was looking away again, almost standing with his
back to them. “ — could hear her dumping the dishes into
the pan like she was throwing them at it. ‘Do you reckon
he will give it back to me?’ Mrs Armstid says. ‘That Texas
man give it to him and said he would. All the folks there
saw him give Mr Snopes the money and heard him say I
could get it from Mr Snopes tomorrow.’ Mrs Littlejohn
was washing the dishes now, washing them like a man
would, like they was made out of iron. ‘No,’ she says. ‘But
asking him wont do no hurt.’ — ‘If he wouldn’t give it back,
it aint no use to ask,’ Mrs Armstid says. — ‘Suit yourself , 1
Mrs Littlejohn says. ‘It’s your money.’ Then I couldn’t
hear nothing but the dishes for a while. ‘Do you reckon he
might give it back to me?’ Mrs Armstid says. ‘That Texas
man said he would. They all heard him say it.’ — ‘Then go
and ask him for it,’ Mrs Littlejohn says. Then I couldn’t
hear nothing but the dishes again. ‘He wont give it back
to me,’ Mrs Armstid says. — ‘All right,’ Mrs Littlejohn
says. *Dont ask him, then.’ Then I just heard the dishes.
They would have two pans, both washing. ‘You dont
reckon he would, do you?* Mrs Armstid says. Mrs Little-
john never said nothing. It sounded like she was throwing
the dishes at one another. ‘Maybe I better go and talk to
Heniy,’ Mrs Armstid says. — ‘I would,’ Mrs Littlejohn says.
And I be dog if it didn’t sound exactly like she had two
plates in her hands, beating them together like these here

5 6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

brass bucket-lids In a band. Then Henry can buy another
five-dollar horse with it. Maybe he’ll buy one next time that
will out and out kill him. If I just thought he would. I’d
give him back that money, myself.’ — ‘I reckon I better
talk to him first,’ Mrs Armstid says. And then it sounded
just like Mrs Littlejohn taken up the dishes and pans and
all and throwed the whole business at the cookstove — ”
Ratliff ceased. Behind him the clerk was hissing “Psstl
Psstl Hem. Fleml” Then he stopped, and all of them
watched Mrs Armstid approach and mount the steps, gaunt
in the shapeless gray garment, the stained tennis shoes hiss-
ing faintly on the boards. She came among them and stood,
facing Snopes but not looking at anyone, her hands rolled
into her apron.

“He said that day he wouldn’t sell Henry that horse,” she
said in a flat toneless voice. “He said you had the money
and I could get it from you.” Snopes raised his head and
turned it slightly again and spat neatly past the woman,
across the gallery and into the road.

“He took all the money with him when he left,” he said.
Motionless, the gray garment hanging in rigid, almost for-
mal folds like drapery in bronze, Mrs Armstid appeared to
be watching something near Snopes’s feet, as though she
had not heard him, or as if she had quitted her body as
soon as she finished speaking and although her body, hear-
ing, had received the words, they would have no life nor
meaning until she returned. The clerk was rubbing his
back steadily against the door-facing again, watching her.
The little boy was watching her too with his unwinking
ineffable gaze, but nobody else was. The man with the
peach spray removed it and spat and put the twig back
into his mouth.

“He said Henry hadn’t bought no horse,” she said. “Ho
said I could get the money from you.”

Spatted Horses 57

“I reckon he forgot it,” Snopes said. “He took all the
money away with him when he left.” He watched her a
moment longer, then he trimmed again at the stick. The
clerk rubbed his back gently against the door, watching
her. After a time Mrs Armstid raised her head and looked
up the road where it went on, mild with spring dust, past
Mrs Littlejohn’s, beginning to rise, on past the not-yet-
bloomed (that would be in June) locust grove across the
way, on past the schoolhouse, the weathered roof of which,
rising beyond an orchard of peach and pear trees, resem-
bled a hive swarmed about by a cloud of pink-and-white
bees, ascending, mounting toward the crest of the hiU
where the church stood among its sparse gleam of marble
headstones in the sombre cedar grove where during the
long afternoons of summer the constant mourning doves
called back and forth. She moved; once more the rubber
soles hissed on the gnawed boards.

“I reckon it’s about time to get dinner started,” she said.

“How s Henry this morning, Mrs Armstid?” Ratliff said.
She looked at him, pausing, the blank eyes waking for an
instant

“He’s resting, I thank you kindly,” she said. Then the
eyes died again and she moved again. Snopes rose from
the chair, closing his knife with his thumb and brushing a
litter of minute shavings from his lap.

“Wait a minute,” he said. Mrs Armstid paused again,
half-turning, though still not looking at Snopes nor at any
of diem. Because she cant possibly actually believe it,
Ratliff told himself. Any more than I do. Snopes entered
the store, the clerk, morionless again, his back and rump
pressed against the door-facing as though waiting to start
rubbing again, watched him enter, his head turning as the
other passed him like the head of an owl, the little eyes
blinking rapidly now. Jody Varner came up the road on

58 WILLIAM FAULKNER

his horse. He did not pass but instead turned in beside (he
store, toward the mulberry tree behind it where he was in
the habit of hitching his horse. A wagon came up the road,
creaking past The man driving it lifted his hand; one or
two of the men on the gallery lifted theirs in response. The
wagon went on. Mrs Armstid looked after it Snopes came
out of the door carrying a small striped paper bag and a p-
preached Mrs Armstid. “Here,” he said. Her hand turned
just enough to receive it “A little sweetening for the
chaps,” he said. His other hand was already in his pocket,
and as he turned back to the chair, he drew something from
his pocket and handed it to the clerk, who took it. It was
a five-cent piece. He sat down in the chair and tilted it back
against the door again. He now had the knife in his hand
again, already open. He turned his head slightly and spat
again, neatly past the gray garment, into the road. Tho
little boy was watching the sack in Mrs Armstid’s hand*
Then she seemed to discover it also, rousing.

“You’re right kind,” she said. She rolled the sack into
the apron, the little boy’s unwinking gaze fixed upon the
lump her hands made beneath the cloth. She moved again*
“I reckon I better get on and help with dinner,” she said.
She descended the steps, though as soon as she reached
the level earth and began to retreat, the gray folds of the
garment once more lost all inference and intimation of
locomotion, so that she seemed to progress without motion
like a figure on a retreating and diminishing float; a gray
and blasted tree-trunk moving, somehow intact and up-
right, upon an unhurried flood. The clerk in the doorway
cackled suddenly, explosively, chortling. He slapped his
thigh.

“By God,” he said, ‘‘you cant beat him.”

Jody Varner, entering the store from the rear, paused in
midstride like a pointing bird-dog. Then, on tiptoe, in com**

Spotted Horses 59

plete silence and with astonishing speed, he darted behind
the counter and sped op the gloomy tunnel, at the end of
which a hulking, bear-shaped figure stooped, its entire head
and shoulders wedged into the glass case which contained
the needles and thread and snuff and tobacco and the stale
gaudy candy. He snatched the boy savagely and viciously
out; the boy gave a choked cry and struggled flabbily,
cramming a final handful of something into his mouth,
chewing. But he ceased to struggle almost at once and be*
came slack and inert save for his jaws. Varner dragged him
around the counter as the clerk entered, seemed to bounce
suddenly into the store with a sort of alert concern. “You,
Saint Eimol” he said.

“Aint I told you and told you to keep him out of here?**
Varner demanded, shaking the boy. “He’s damn near eaten
that candy-case clean. Stand up!” The boy hung like a half-
filled sack from Varner’s hand, chewing with a kind of
fatalistic desperation, the eyes shut tight in the vast flaccid
colorless face, the ears moving steadily and faintly to the
chewing. Save for the jaw and the ears, he appeared to have
gone to sleep chewing.

“You, Saint Eimol” the clerk said. “Stand up!” The boy
assumed his own weight, though he did not open his eyes
yet nor cease to chew. Varner released him. “Git on
home,” the clerk said. The boy turned obediently to re-
enter the store. Varner jerked him about again.

“Not that way,” he said. The boy crossed the gallery
and descended the steps, the tight overalls unduiant and
reluctant across his flabby thighs. Before he reached the
ground, his hand rose from his pocket to his mouth; again
his ears moved faintly to the motion of chewing.

“He’s worse than a rat, aint he?” the clerk said.

“Rat, hell,” Varner said, breathing harshly. “He’s worse
than a goat First thing I know, he’ll graze on back and

(SO WILLIAM FAULKNER

work through that lace leather and them hame-strings and
lap-links and ring-bolts and eat me and you and him all
three clean out the back door. And then be damned if I
wouldn’t be afraid to turn my back for fear he would cross
the road and start in on the gin and the blacksmith shop*
Now you mind what I say. If I catch him hanging around
here one more time, I’m going to set a bear-trap for him.”
He went out onto the gallery, the clerk following. “Morn-
ing, gentlemen,” he said.

“Who’s that one, Jody?” Ratliff said. Save for the clerk
in the background, they were the only two standing, and
now, in juxtaposition, you could see the resemblance be-
tween them — a resemblance intangible, indefinite, not in
figure, speech, dress, intelligence; certainly not in morals.
Yet it was there, but with this bridgeless difference, this
hallmark of his fate upon him: he would become an old
man; Ratliff, too: but an old man who at about sixty-five
would be caught and married by a creature not yet seven-
teen probably, who would for the rest of his life continue
to take revenge npon him for her whole sex; Ratliff, never.
The boy was moving without haste up the road. His hand
rose again from his pocket to his mouth.

‘That boy of I. O.’s,” Varner said. “By God, I’ve done
everything but put out poison for him.”

“What?” Ratliff said. He glanced qtiickly about at the
faces; for an instant there was in his own not only be-
wilderment but something almost like terror. “I thought —
the other day you fellows told me — You said it was a
woman, a young woman with a baby — Here now,” he
said. “Wait”

“This here’s another one,” Varner said. T wish to hell
he couldn’t walk. Well, Eck, I hear you caught one of your
horses.”

“That’s right,” Eck said. He and the little boy had fin-

Spotted Horses 61

ished the crackers and cheese and he had sat for some time
now, holding the empty bag.

“It was the one he give you, wasn't it?” Varner said.

“That’s right,” Eck said

“Give the other one to me, paw,” the little boy said.

“What happened?” Varner said,

“He broke his neck,” Eck said.

“I know,” Varner said. “But how?” Eck did not move.
Watching him, they could almost see him visibly gathering
and arranging words, speech. Varner, looking down at
him, began to laugh steadily and harshly, sucking his teeth.
“I’ll tell you what happened. Eck and that boy finally run
it into that blind lane of Freeman’s, after a chase of about
twenty-four hours. They figured it couldn’t possibly climb
them eight-foot fences of Freeman’s so him and the boy
tied their rope across the end of the lane, about three feet
ofi the ground. And sho enough, soon as the horse come to
the end of the lane and seen Freeman’s barn, it whirled
just like Eck figured it would and come helling back up
that lane like a scared hen-hawk. It probably never even
seen the rope at all. Mrs Freeman was watching from where
she had run up onto the porch. She said that when it hit
that rope, it looked just like one of these here great big
Christmas pinwheels. But the one you bought got clean
away, didn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Eck said. “I never had time to see which
Way the other one went.”

“Give him to me, paw,” the little boy said.

“You wait till we catch him,” Eck said. “We’ll see about
it then.”

That afternoon Ratliff sat in the halted buckboard in
front of Bookwright’s gate. Bookwright stood in the road
beside it “You were wrong,” Bookwright said. “He come
back.”

6z WILLIAM FAULKNER

“He come back,” Ratliff said “I misjudged his . . .
nerve aint the word I want, and sholy lack of it aint But I
wasn’t wrong.**

“Nonsense*" Bookwright said “He was gone all day
yesterday. Nobody saw him going to town or coming back,
but that’s bound to be where he was at. Aint no man, I
dont care if his name is Snopes, going to let his own blood
kin rot in jail."

“Ho wont be in jail long. Court is next month, and after
they send him to Parchman, he can stay outdoors again.
He will even go back to farming, plowing. Of course it
wont be his cotton, but then he never did make enough out
of his own cotton to quite pay him for staying alive.”

“Nonsense,” Bookwright said “I dont believe it Hem
aint going to let him go to the penitentiary.”

“Yes,” Ratliff said. “Because Hem Snopes has got to
caned all them loose-flying notes that turns up here and
there every now and then. He’s going to discharge at least
some cf the notes for good and alL” They looked at one
another — Ratliff grave and easy in the blue shirt, Book-
wright sober too, black-browed, intent

“I thought you said you and him burned them notes.”

“I said we burned two notes that Mink Snopes gave me#
Do you think that any Snopes is going to put all of any-
thing on one piece of paper that can be destroyed by on©
match? Do you think there Is any Snopes that dont know
that?”

“Oh,” Bookwright said “Hah,” he said, with no mirth.
“I reckon yon gave Henry Armstid back his five dollars
too.” Then Ratliff looked away. His face changed — some-
thing fleeting, quizzical, but not smiling, his eyes did not
smile; it was gone.

“I could have,” he said ‘‘But I didn’t. I might have if I
could just been sho he would buy something this time that

Spotted Horses 63

would sho enough kill him, like Mrs Littlejohn said. Be-
sides, I wasn’t protecting a Snopes from Snopeses; I wasn’t
even protecting a people from a Snopes. I was protecting
something that wasn’t even a people, that wasn’t nothing
but something that dont want nothing but to walk and fed
the sun and wouldn’t know how to hurt no man even if it
would and wouldn’t want to even if it could, just like I
wouldn't stand by and see you steal a meat-bone from a
dog. I never made them Snopeses and I never made the
folks that cant wait to bare their backsides to them. I could
do more, but I wont I wont, I tell youl”

“All right,” Bookwright said. ‘Hook your drag up; It
aini nothing but a hilL I said it’s all right”

2

The two actions of Armstid pi. vs. Snopes, and TuU
pi. vs. Eckrum Snopes (and anyone else named Snopes or
Varner either which Tull's irate wife could contrive to
involve, as the village well knew) were accorded a change
of venue by mutual agreement and arrangement among the
litigants. Three of the parties did, that is, because Flem
Snopes flatly refused to recognise the existence of the suit
against himself, stating once and without heat and first
turning his head slightly aside to spit, “They wasn’t none
of my horses,” then fell to whittling again while the baffled
and helpless bailiff stood before the tilted chair with the
papers he was trying to serve.

“What a opportunity for that Snopes family lawyer this
would a been,” Ratliff said when told about it “What’s his
name? that quick-fatherer, the Moses with his mouth full
of mottoes and his coat-tail full of them already half-grown
retroactive sons? I dont understand yet how a man that has

WILLIAM FAULKNER

<4

to spend as much time as I do being constantly reminded
of them folks, still cant keep the names straight L O. That
he never had time to wait This here would be probably the
one tried case in his whole legal existence where he
wouldn’t be bothered with no narrow-ideaed client trying
to make him stop talking, and the squire presiding himself
would be the only man in company with authority to tell
him to shut up.”

So neither did the Varner surrey nor RatlifFs backboard
make one among the wagons, the buggies, and the saddled
horses and mules which moved out of the village on that
May Saturday morning, to converge upon Whiteleaf store
eight miles away, coming not only from Frenchman’s Bend
but from other directions too since by that time, what
Ratliff had called ‘that Texas sickness,’ that spotted corrup-
tion of frantic and uncatchable horses, had spread aa far aa
twenty and thirty miles. So by the time the Frenchman’s
Bend people began to arrive, there were two dozen wagons,
the teams reversed and eased of harness and tied to the
sear wheels in order to pass the day, and twice that many
saddled animals already standing about the locust grove
beside the store and the site of the hearing had already
been transferred from the store to an adjacent died where
in the fall cotton would be stored. But by nine oclock it
was seen that even the shed would not hold them all, so
the palladium was moved again, from the shed to the grove
itself. The horses and mules and wagons were cleared from
it; the single chair, the gnawed table bearing a thick Bible
which had the appearance of loving and constant use of a
piece of old and perfectly kept machinery and an almanac
and a copy of Mississippi Reports dated 1881 and bearing
along its opening edge a single thread-thin line of soilure
as if during all the time of his possession its owner (or
user) had opened it at only one page though that quite

Spotted Horses 65

often, were fetched from the died to the grove; a wagon
and four men were dispatched and returned presently from
the church a mile away with four wooden pews for the
litigants and their clansmen and witnesses; behind these in
ton the spectators stood — the men, the women, the chil-
dren, sober, attentive, and neat, not in their Sunday clothes
to be sure, but in the clean working garments donned that
morning for the Saturday’s diversion of sitting about the
country stores or trips into the county seat, and in which
they would return to the field on Monday morning and
would wear all that week until Friday night came round
again. The Justice of the Peace was a neat, small, plump
old man resembling a tender caricature of all grandfathers
who ever breathed, in a beautifully laundered though cob
larless white shirt with immaculate starch-gleaming cuffs
and bosom, and steel-framed spectacles and neat, faintly
curling white hair. He sat behind the table and looked at
them — at the gray woman in the gray sunbonnet and dress,
her clasped and motionless hands on her lap resembling a
gnarl of pallid and drowned roots from a drained swamp;
at Tull in his faded but absolutely dean shirt and the over-
alls which his womenfolks not only kept immaculately
washed but starched and ironed also, and not creased
through the legs but flat across them from seam to seam,
so that on each Saturday morning they resembled the short
pants of a small boy, and the sedate and Innocent blue of
his eyes above the month-old corn-silk beard which con-
cealed most of his abraded face and which gave him an air
of incredible and paradoxical dissoluteness, not as though
at last and without warning he had appeared in the sight
of his feUowmen in his true character, but as if an old
Italian portrait of a child saint had been defaced by a
vicious and idle boy; at Mrs Tull, a strong, full-bosomed
though slightly dumpy woman with an expression of grim

66 WILLIAM FAULKNER

and seething outrage which the elapsed four weeks had
apparently neither increased nor diminished but had
merely set, an outrage which curiously and almost at once
began to give the impression of being directed not at any
Snopes or at any other man in particular but at all men,
all males, and of which Tull himself was not at all the vio-
tim but the subject, who sat on one side of her husband
while the biggest of the four daughters sat on the other as
if they (or Mrs Tull at least) were not so much convinced
that Tull might leap up and flee, as determined that he
would not; and at Eck and the little boy, identical save for
size, and Lump the clerk in a gray cap which someone
actually recognised as being the one which Hem Snopes
had worn when he went to Texas last year, who between
spells of rapid blinking would sit staring at the Justice
with the lidless intensity of a rat — and into the lens-dis-
torted and irisless old-man’s eyes of the Justice there grew
an expression not only of amazement and bewilderment
but, as in Ratliffs eyes while he stood on the store gallery
four weeks ago, something very like terror.

‘‘This—” he saidL “I didn’t expect — I didn’t look to see
•— Fm going to pray,** he said. “I aint going to pray aloud,
But I hope—*’ He looked at them. “I wish . . . Maybe
some of you all anyway had better do the same.* 9 He bowed
his head. They watched him, quiet and grave, while he sat
motionless behind the table, the li ght morning wind mov-
ing faintly in his thin hair and the shadow«tipplo of windy
leaves gliding and flowing across the starched bulge of
bosom and the gleaming bone-buttoned cuffs, as rigid and
almost as large as sections of six-inch stovepipe, at his
joined hands. He raised his head. “Armstid against
Snopes," he said. Mrs Armstid spoke. She did not move,
die looked at nothing, her hands clasped in her lap, speak-
ing in that flat, toneless and hopeless voice:

67

Spotted Horses

•That Texas man said *

“Wait* the Justice said. He looked about at the faces,
(he blurred eyes fleeing behind the thick lenses. “Where is
the defendant? I dontsee him*

Tie wouldn't come,* the bailiff said
“Wouldn't come?* die Justice said “Didn't you servo
the papers on him?*

“He wouldn't take them,* the bailiff said. “He said "

“Then he is in contempt!* the Justice cried.

“What for?* Lump Snopes said “Aint nobody proved
yet they was his horses.* The Justice looked at him.

“Are you representing the defendant?” he said Snopes
blinked at him for a moment

“What’s that mean?” he said “That you aim for me to
pay whatever fine you think you can clap onto him?*

“So he refuses to defend himself,” the Justice said
“Dont he know that I can find against him for that reason,
even if pure justice and decency aint enough?”

“It’ll be pure something,” Snopes said “It dont take no

mind-reader to see how your mind is *

“Shut up, Snopes,* the bailiff said “If you aint in this
case, you keep out of it.” He turned back to the Justice.
“What you want me to do: go over to the Bend and fetch
Snopes hero anyway? I reckon I can do it*

“No,” the Justice said. “Wait” He looked about at the
sober faces again with that bafflement that dread “Does
anybody here know for sho who them horses belonged to?
Anybody?* They looked back at him, sober, attentive— at
the neat immaculate old man sitting with his hands locked
together on the table before him to still the trembling. “AH
right Mrs Armstid," he said “Tell the court what hap-
pened* She told it unmoving, in the fiat inflectionless
voice, looking at nothing, while they listened quietly, com*
ing to the end and ceasing without even any fall of voice, as

68 WILLIAM FAULKNER

though the tale mattered nothing and came to nothing. The
Justice was looking down at his hands. When she ceased,
he looked up at her. “But you haven’t showed yet that
Snopeg owned the horses. The one you want to sue is that
Texas man. And he’s gone. If you got a judgment against
him, you couldn’t collect the money. Don! you see?”

“Mr Snopes brought him here,” Mrs Armstid said.
“Likely that Texas man wouldn’t have knowed where
Frenchman’s Bend was if Mr Snopes hadn’t showed him.”

“But it was the Texas man that sold the horses and col-
lected the money for them.” The Justice looked about
again at the faces. “Is that right? You, Bookwiight, Is that
what happened?”

“Yes,” Bookwright said. The Justice looked at Mrs.
Armstid again, with that pity and grief. As the morning in-
creased the wind had risen, so that from time to time gusts
of it ran through the branches overhead, bringing a faint
snow of petals, prematurely bloomed as the spring itself
had condensed with spendthrift speed after the hard winter,
and the heavy and drowsing scent of them, about the mo-
tionless heads.

“He give Mr Snopes Henry’s money. He said Henry
hadn’t bought no horse. He said I could get the money
from Mr Snopes tomorrow.”

“And you have witnesses that saw and heard him?”

“Y es, sir. The other men that was there saw him give Mr
Snopes the money and say that I could get it———”

“And you asked Snopes for the money?”

“Yes, sir. He said that Texas man taken it away with
him when he left But I would . . She ceased again,
perhaps looking down at her hands also. Certainty she was
not looking at anyone.

“Yes?” the Justice said. * You would what?”

“I would know them five dollars. I earned them myself^

Spotted Horses 69

weaving at night after Henry and the chaps was asleep.
Some of the ladies in Jefferson would save up string and
such and give it to me and I would weave things and sell
them. I earned that money a little at a time and I would
know It when I saw it because I would take the can outen
the chimney and count it now and then while it was mak-
ing up to enough to buy my chaps some shoes for next
winter. I would know it if I was to see it again. If Mr
Snopes would just let ”

“Suppose there was somebody seen Hem give that
money back to that Texas fellow,” Lump Snopes said
suddenly.

“Did anybody here see that?” the Justice said.

“Yes,” Snopes said, harshly and violently. “Eck here
did.” He looked at Eck. “Go on. Tell him.” The Justice
looked at Eck; the four Tull girls turned their heads as one
head and looked at him, and Mrs Tull leaned forward to
look past her husband, her face cold, furious, and con-
temptuous, and those standing shifted to look past one
another’s heads at Eck sitting motionless on the bench.

“Did you see Snopes give Armstid’s money back to the
Texas man, Eck?” the Justice said. Still Eck did not an-
swer nor move. Lump Snopes made a gross violent sound
through the side of his mouth.

“By God, I aint afraid to say it if Eck is. I seen him do
it”

“Will you swear that as testimony?” Snopes looked at
file Justice. He did not blink now.

“So you wont take my word,” he said.

*T want the truth,” the Justice said. “If I cant find that;
I got to have sworn evidence of what I will have to accept
as truth.” He lifted the Bible from the two other books.

“AH right,” the bailiff said. “Step up here.” Snopes rose
from the bench and approached. They watched him.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

70

though now there was no shifting nor craning, no move-
ment at all among the faces, the still eyes. Snopes at the
table looked back at them once, his gaze traversing swiftly
the crescent-shaped rank; he looked at the Justice again*
The bailiff grasped the Bible; though die Justice did not
release it yet

“You are ready to swear you saw Snopes give that Texas
man back the money he took from Henry Armstid for that
horse?” he said.

“I said I was, didn't I?” Snopes said. The Justice re-
leased the Bible.

“Swear him," he said.

“Put your left hand on the Book raise your right hand
you solemnly swear and affirm — ” the bailiff said rapidly.
But Snopes had already done so, his left hand dapped
onto the extended Bible and the other hand raised and his
head turned away as once more his gaze went rapidly along
the circle of expressionless and intent faces, saying in that
harsh and snarling voice:

“Yes. I saw Flem Snopes give back to that Texas man
whatever money Henry Armstid or anybody else thinks
Henry Armstid or anybody else paid Flem for any of them
horses. Does that suit you?”

*‘Yes,* > the Justice said. Then there was no movement,
no sound anywhere among them. The bailiff placed the
Bible quietly on the table beside the Justice's locked hands,
and there was no movement save the flow and recover of
the windy shadows and the drift of the locust petals. Then
Mrs Armstid rose; she stood once more (or still) looking
at nothing, her hands clasped across her middle.

“1 reckon I can go now, cant I?” she said.

“Yes," the Justice said, rousing. “Unless you would
like "

“I better get started,” she said. “It's a right far piece."

Spotted Horses 7 1

She had not come in the wagon, but on one of the gaunt
and underfed mules. One of the men followed her across
the grove and untied the mule for her and led it up to a
wagon, from one hub of which she mounted. Then they
looked at the Justice again. He sat behind the table, his
hands still joined before him, though his head was not
bowed now. Yet he did not move until the bailiff leaned
and spoke to him, when he roused, came suddenly awake
without starting, as an old man wakes from an old man’s
light sleep. He removed his hands from the table and, look-
ing down, he spoke exactly as if he were reading from a
paper:

“Tull against Snopes. Assault and ”

“Yesl” Mrs Tull said. ‘Tm going to say a word before
you start.” She leaned, looking past Tull at Lump Snopesr
again. “If you think you are going to lie and perjure Fiem

and Eck Snopes out of ”

“Now, mamma,” Tull said. Now she spoke to Tull,
without changing her position or her tone or even any
break or pause in her speech:

“Dont you say hush to me! You’ll let Eck Snopes or
Hem Snopes or that whole Varner tribe snatch you out of
the wagon and beat you half to death against a wooden
bridge. But when it comes to suing them for your just
rights and a punishment, oh no. Because that wouldn’t be
neighborly. What’s neighborly got to do with you lying flat
on your back in the middle of planting time while we pick
splinters out of your face?” By this time the bailiff was
shouting.

“Order! Order! This here’s a law court!” Mrs Tuff
ceased. She sat back, breathing hard, staring at the Justice,
who sat and spoke again as if he were reading aloud:

“ — assault and battery on the person of Vernon Tull,
through the agency and instrument of one horse, unnamed.

72 WILLIAM FAULKNER

belonging to Eckrum Snopes. Evidence of physical detri-
ment and suffering, defendant himself. Witnesses, Mrs Tull
and daughters ”

“Eck Snopes saw it too,** Mrs TuK said, though with less
violence now. “He was there. He got there in plenty of
time to see it Let him deny it Let him look me in the face
and deny it if he ”

“If you please, ma’am,” the Justice said. He said it so
quietly that Mrs Tull hushed and became quite calm, al-
most a rational and composed being. “The injury to your
husband aint disputed. And the agency of the horse aint
disputed. The law says that when a man owns a creature
which he knows to be dangerous and if that creature is
restrained and restricted from the public commons by a
pen or enclosure capable of restraining and restricting it,
if a man enter that pen or enclosure, whether he knows the
creature in it is dangerous or not dangerous, then that man
has committed trespass and the owner of that creature is
not liable. But if that creature known to him to be danger-
ous ceases to be restrained by that suitable pen or en-
closure, either by accident or design and either with or
without the owner’s knowledge, then that owner is liable.
That’s the law. All necessary now is to establish first, the
ownership of the horse, and second, that the horse was a
dangerous creature within the definition of the law as
provided.”

“Hah,” Mrs TuH said. She said it exactly as Bookwright
would have. “Dangerous. Ask Vernon TulL Ask Henry
Armstid if them things was pets.”

“If you please, ma’am,” the Justice said. He was look-
ing at Eck. “What is the defendant’s position? Denial of
ownership?”

“What?” Eck said.

“Was that your horse that ran over Mr TuU?"

Spotted Horses 73

“Yes," Eck said. “It was mine. How much do I have to

p n

“Hah," Mrs Tull said again. “Denial of ownership.
When then wen at least forty men— foob too, or they
wouldn’t have been (hen. But even a fool’s word is good
about what he saw and heard — at least forty men heard
that Texas murderer give that horse to Eck Scopes. Not
sell it to him, mind; give it to him.”

“What?” the Justice said. “Gave it to him?”

“Yes,” Eck said. “Ho give it to me. Fm sorry Toll hap-
pened to be using that bridge too at the same time. How
much do I ■”

“Wait,” the Justice said. “What did you give him? a
note? a swap of some kind?”

“No,” Eck said. “He just pointed to it in the lot and told
me it belonged to me.”

“And he didn’t give yon a bill of sale or a deed or any-
thing in writing?”

“I reckon he never had time,” Eck said. “And after Lon
Quick forgot and left that gate open, never nobody had
time to do no writing even if we had a thought of it”

“What’s all this?” Mrs Tull said. “Eck Snopes has just
told you he owned (hat horse. And if you wont take his
word, there were forty men standing at that gate all day
long doing nothing, that heard that murdering card-playing
whiskey-drinking antichrist—” This time the Justice raised
one hand, in its enormous pristine cuff, toward her. He d id
not look at her.

“Wait,” he said. “Then what did he do?” he said to Eck.
"Just lead the horse up and put the rope in your hand?"

“No,” Eck said. “Him nor nobody else never got no
ropes on none of them. He just pointed to the horse in the
lot and said it was mine and auctioned off the rest of them
and got into the buggy and said good-bye and druv off.

74 WILLIAM FAULKNER

And we got our ropes and went into the lot, only Lem
Quick forgot to shut the gate, Fm sorry it made Tull’s
mules snatch him outen the wagon. How much do I own
him?” Then he stopped, because the Justice was no longer
looking at him and, as he realised a moment later, no
longer listening cither. Instead, he was sitting back in tho
chair, actually leaning back in it for the first time, his head
bent slightly and his hands resting on the table before him,
the fingers lightly overlapped. They watched him quietly
for almost a half-minute before anyone realised that he was
looking quietly and steadily at Mrs TuIL

“Well, Mrs Tull,” he said, “by your own testimony, Edfc
never owned that horse,”

“What?” Mrs Tull said. It was not loud at alL “What did
you say?”

“In the law, ownership cant be conferred or invested by
word-of-mouth* It must be established either by recorded
or authentic document, or by possession or occupation. By
your testimony and his both, he never gave that Texan
anything in exchange for that horse, and by his testimony
the Texas man never gave him any paper to prove ho
owned it, and by his testimony and by what I know myself
from time last four weeks, nobody yet has ever laid hand
or rope either cm any one of them So that horse never
came into Eck*s possession at alL That Texas man could
have given that same horse to & dozen other men standing
around that gate that day, without even needing to tellEck
he had done it; and Eck himself could have transferred all
his title and equity in it to Mr Tull right there while Mr
Tull was lying unconscious on that bridge just by thinking
It to himself, and Mr Tull’s title would be just as legal as
Eck’s.”

“So I get nothing,” Mrs Tull said. Her voice was stm
calm, quiet, though probably no one but Tull realised that

Spotted Horses 75

ft was too calm and quiet “My team is made to run away
by a wild spotted mad dog, my wagon Is wrecked; my bus-*
band is jerked out of it and knocked unconscious and un-
able to work for a whole week with less thim half of out
seed in the ground, and I get nothing."

“Wait,” the Justice said. “The law M

“The law," Mrs Tull said. She stood suddenly up— a
short, broad, strong woman, balanced on the balls of her
planted feet

“Now, mamma,” Tull said.

“Yes, ma’am,” the Justice said. “Your damages are fixed
by statute. The law says that when a suit for damages is
brought against the owner of an animal which has com-
mitted damage or injury, if the owner of the animal
cither cant or wont assume liability, the injured or dam-
aged party shall find recompense in the body of the ani-
mal. And since Eck Snopes never owned that horse at hll,
and since you just heard a case here this morning that
failed to prove that Flem Snopes had any equity in any of
them, that horse still belongs to that Texas man. Or did
belong. Because now that horse that made your team run
away and snatch your husband out of the wagon, belongs
to you and Mr Tull.”

“Now, mammal” Tull said. He rose quickly. But Mrt
Tull was still quiet, only quite rigid and breathing hard,
until Tull spoke. Then she turned on him, not screaming:
shouting; presently the bailiff was banging the table-top
with his hand-polished hickory cane and roaring “Order!
Order!” while the neat old man, thrust backward in his
chair as though about to dodge and trembling with an old
man’s palsy, looked on with amazed unbelief.

“The horseP Mrs Tull shouted. “We see it for five
seconds, while it is climbing into the wagon with us and
then out again. Then it’s gone, God dont know where and

76 WILLIAM FAULKNER

thank the Lord He dont! And the mules gone with it and
the wagon wrecked and you laying there on the bridge
with your face full of kindling-wood and bleeding like a
hog and dead for all we knew. And he gives ns the horse!
Dont hush me! Get on to that wagon, fool that would sit
there behind a pair of young mules with the lines tied
around his wrist! Get on to that wagon, all of you!”

“I cant stand no more!” the old Justice cried. ‘1 wont!
This court’s adjourned! Adjourned!”

*

OLD MAN

ONCE (it was in Mississippi, in May, in the flood
year 1927) there were two convicts. One of them was
about twenty-five, tall, lean, flat-stomached, with a sun-
burned face and Indian-black hair and pale, china-col-
ored outraged eyes — an outrage directed not at the men
who had foiled his crime, not even at the lawyers and
judges who had sent him here, but at the writers, the*
uncorporeal names attached to the stories, the paper
novels — the Diamond Dicks and Jesse Jameses and such
— whom he believed had led him into his present pre-
dicament through their own ignorance and gullibility
regarding the medium in which they dealt and took

77

78 WILLIAM FAULKNER

money for, in accepting information on which they
placed the stamp of verisimilitude and authenticity (this
so much the more criminal since there was no sworn
notarised statement attached and hence so much the
quicker would the information be accepted by one who
expected the same unspoken good faith, demanding, ask-
ing, expecting no certification, which he extended along
With the dime or fifteen cents to pay for it) and retailed
for money and which on actual application proved to
be impractical and (to the convict) criminally false;
there would be times when he would halt his mule and
plow in midfurrow (there is no walled penitentiary in
Mississippi; it is a cotton plantation which the convicts
work under the rifles and shotguns of guards and trust-
ies) and muse with a kind of enraged impotence, fum-
bling among the rubbish left him by his one and only
experience with courts and law, fumbling until the mean-
ingless and verbose shibboleth took form at last (himself
seeking justice at the same blind fount where he had met
justice and been hurled back and down) : Using the mails
to defraud: who felt that he had been defrauded by the
third-class mail system not of crass and stupid money
which he did not particularly want anyway, but of liberty
and honor and pride.

He was in for fifteen years (he had arrived shortly after
his nineteenth birthday) for attempted train robbery. He
had laid his plans in advance, he had followed his printed
(and false) authority to the letter; he had saved the paper-
backs for two years, reading and rereading them, memoris-
ing them, comparing and weighing story and method against
story and method, taking the good from each and discard-
ing the dross as his workable plan emerged, keeping his
mind open to make the subtle last-minute changes, without
haste and without impatience, as the newer pamphlets ap-

Old Man 79

peared on their appointed days as a conscientious dress-
maker makes the subtle alterations in a court presentation
costume as the newer bulletins appear. And then when the
day came, he did not even have a chance to go through the
coaches and collect the watches and the rings, the brooches
and the hidden money-belts, because he had been captured
as soon as he entered the express car where the safe and
the gold would be. He had shot no one because the pistol
which they took away from him was not that kind of a
pistol although it was loaded; later he admitted to the
District Attorney that he had got it, as well as the dark
lantern in which a candle burned and the black handker-
chief to wear over the face, by peddling among his pine-
hill neighbors subscriptions to the Detectives" Gazette .
So now from time to time (he had ample leisure for it)
he mused with that raging impotence, because there was
something else he could not tell them at the trial, did not
know how to tell them. It was not the money he had
wanted* It was not riches, not the crass loot; that would
have been merely a bangle to wear upon the breast of
his pride like the Olympic runner’s amateur medal — a
symbol, a badge to show that he too was the best at his
chosen gambit in the living and fluid world of his time.
So that at times as he trod the richly shearing black
earth behind his plow or with a hoe thinned the sprout-
ing cotton and com or lay on his sullen back in his bunk
after supper, he cursed in a harsh steady unrepetitive
stream, not at the living men who had put him where
he was but at what he did not even know were pennames,
did not even know were not actual men but merely the
designations of shades who had written about shades.

The second convict was short and plump. Almost hair-
less, he was quite white. He looked like something ex-
posed to fight by turning over rotting logs or planks and

80 WILLIAM FAULKNER

he too carried (though not in his eyes like the first con-
vict) a sense of burning and impotent outrage. So it did
not show on him and hence none knew it was there. But
then nobody knew very much about him, including the
people who had sent him here. His outrage was directed
at no printed word but at the paradoxical fact that he had
been forced to come here of his own free choice and will.
He had been forced to choose between the Mississippi
State penal farm and the Federal Penitentiary at Atlanta,
and the fact that he, who resembled a hairless and pallid
slug, had chosen the out-of-doors and the sunlight was
merely another manifestation of the dose-guarded and
solitary enigma of his character, as something recognisable
foils momentarily into view from beneath stagnant and
opaque water, then sinks again. None of his fellow pris-
oners knew what his crime had been, save that he was in
for a hundred and ninety-nine years — this incredible and
Impossible period of punishment or restraint itself carry-
ing a vicious and fabulous quality which indicated that
bis reason for being here was such that the very men, the
paladins and pillars of justice and equity who had sent him
here had during that moment become blind apostles not of
mere justice but of all human decency, blind instruments
not of equity but of all human outrage and vengeance, act-
ing in a savage personal concert, judge* lawyer and jury,
which certainly abrogated justice and possibly even law.
Possibly only the Federal and State’s Attorneys knew
what the crime actually was. There had been a woman in
it and a stolen automobile transported across a state line, a
filling station robbed and the attendant shot to death. There
had been a second man in the car at the time and anyone
could have looked once at the convict (as the two attor-
neys did) and known he would not even have had the syn-
thetic courage of alcohol to pull trigger on anyone. But he

Old Man 81

and the woman and the stolen car had been captured while
the second man, doubtless the actual murderer, had es-
caped, so that, brought to bay at last in the State’s Attoi*
ney’s office, harried, dishevelled and snarling, the two
grimly implacable and viciously gleeful attorneys in his
front and the now raging woman held by two policemen in
the anteroom in his rear, he was given his choice. He
could be tried in Federal Court under the Mann Act and
for the automobile, that is, by electing to pass through
the anteroom where the woman raged he could take his
chances on the lesser crime in Federal Court, or by ac-
cepting a sentence for manslaughter in the State Court
he would be permitted to quit the room by a back entrance,
without having to pass the woman. He had chosen; he
stood at the bar and heard a judge (who looked down at
him as if the District Attorney actually had turned over a
rotten plank with his toe and exposed him) sentence him
to a hundred and ninety-nine years at the State Farm. Thus
(he had ample leisure too; they had tried to teach him to
plow and had failed, they had put him in the blacksmith
shop and the foreman trusty himself had asked to have him
removed: so that now, in a long apron like a woman, ho
cooked and swept and dusted in the deputy wardens’ bar-
racks) he too mused at times with that sense of impotence
and outrage though it did not show on him as on the first
convict since he leaned on no halted broom to do it and so
none knew it was there.

It was this second convict who, toward the end of
April, began to read aloud to the others from the daily
newspapers when, chained ankle to ankle and herded by
armed guards, they had come up from the fields and had
eaten supper and were gathered in the bunkhouse. It was
the Memphis newspaper which the deputy wardens had
read at breakfast; the convict read aloud from it to his.com-

82 WILLIAM FAULKNER

panions who could have had but little active interest in the
outside world, some of whom could not have read it for
themselves at all and did not even know where the Ohio
and Missouri river basins were, some of whom had never
even seen the Mississippi River although for past periods
ranging from a few days to ten and twenty and thirty years
(and for future periods ranging from a few months to life)
they had plowed and planted and eaten and slept beneath
the shadow of the levee itself, knowing only that there was
water beyond it from hearsay and because now and then
they heard the whistles of steamboats from beyond it and
during the last week or so had seen the stacks and pilot
houses moving along the sky sixty feet above their heads.

But they listened, and soon even those who like the
taller convict had probably never before seen more water
than a horse pond would hold knew what thirty feet on a
river gauge at Cairo or Memphis meant and could (and
did) talk glibly of sandboils. Perhaps what actually moved
them was the accounts of the conscripted levee gangs,
mixed blacks and whites working in double shifts against
the steadily rising water; stories of men, even though they
were Negroes, being forced like themselves to do work for
which they received no other pay than coarse food and a
place in a inudiloored tent to sleep on — stories, pictures,
which emerged from the shorter convict's reading voice:
the mudsplashed white men with the inevitable shotguns,
the antlike lines of Negroes carrying sandbags, slipping and
crawling up the steep face of the revetment to hurl their
futile ammunition into the face of a flood and return for
more. Or perhaps it was more than this. Perhaps they
watched the approach of the disaster with that same
amazed and incredulous hope of the slaves— the lions and
bears and elephants, the grooms and bathmen and pastry-
cooks — who watched the mounting flames of Rome from

Old Man 83

Ahenobarbus* gardens. But listen they did and presently
it was May and the wardens’ newspaper began to talk in
headlines two inches tall — those black staccato slashes ot
ink which, it would almost seem, even the illiterate should
be able to read: Crest Passes Memphis at Midnight 4000
Homeless in White River Basin Governor Calls out No •
tional Guard Martial Law Declared in Following Counties
Red Cross Train with Secretary Hoover Leaves Washing-
ton Tonight; then, three evenings later (It had been raining
all day — not the vivid brief thunderous downpours of
April and May, but the slow steady gray nun of November
and December before a cold north wind. The men had not
gone to the fields at all during the day, and the very second-
hand optimism of the almost twenty-four-hour-old news
seemed to contain its own refutation.) : Crest Now Below
Memphis 22,000 Refugees Safe at Vicksburg Army En-
gineers Say Levees Will Hold.

“I reckon that means it will bust tonight,” one convict
said.

“Well, maybe this rain will hold on until the water gets
here,” a second said. They all agreed to this because what
they meant, the living unspoken thought among them, was
that if the weather cleared, even though the levees broke
and the flood moved in upon the Farm itself, they would
have to return to the fields and work, which they would
have had to da There was nothing paradoxical in this, al-
though they could not have expressed the reason for it
which they instinctively perceived: that the land they
farmed and the substance they produced from it belonged
neither to diem who worked it nor to those who forced
them at guns’ point to do so, that as far as either — convicts
or guards — were concerned, it could have been pebbles
they put into the ground and papier-m&ch6 cotton- and
corn-sprouts which they thinned. So it was that, what be-

84 WILLIAM FAULKNER

tween the sudden wild hoping and the idle day and the eve-
ning’s headlines, they were sleeping restlessly beneath the
sound of the rain on the tin roof when at midnight the sud-
den glare of the electric bulbs and the guards’ voices waked
them and they heard the throbbing of the waiting trucks.

“Turn out of there!” the deputy shouted. He was fully
dressed — rubber boots, slicker and shotgun. “The levee
went out at Mound’s Landing an hour ago. Get up out
ofitl”

When the belated and streaming dawn broke, the two
convicts, along with twenty others, were in a truck. A
trusty drove, two armed guards sat in the cab with him. In-
side the high, stall-like topless body the convicts stood,
packed like matches in an upright box or like the pencil-
shaped ranks of cordite in a shell, shackled by the ankles
to a single chain which wove among the motionless feet
and swaying legs and a clutter of picks and shovels among
which they stood, and was riveted by both ends to the steel
body of the truck.

Then and without warning they saw the flood about
which the plump convict had been reading and they listen-
ingfor two weeks or more. The road ran south. It was built
on a raised levee, known locally as a dump, about eight
feet above the flat surrounding land, bordered on both
sides by the barrow pits from which the earth of the levee
had been excavated. These barrow pits had held water all
winter from the fall rains, not to speak of the rain of yes-
terday, but now they saw that the pit on either side of the
road had vanished and instead there lay a flat still sheet of
brown water which extended into the fields beyond the pits,
ravelled out into long motionless shreds in the bottom of
the plow furrows and gleaming faintly in the gray light like

Old Man 85

the bars of a prone and enormous grating. And then (the
truck was moving at good speed) as they watched quietly
(they had not been talking much anyway but now they
were all silent and quite grave, shifting and craning as one
to look sobedy off to the west side of the road) the crests
of the furrows vanished too and they now looked at a single
perfectly flat and motionless steel-colored sheet in which
the telephone poles and the straight hedgerows which
marked section lines seemed to be fixed and rigid as though
set in concrete.

It was perfectly motionless, perfectly fiat It looked, not
innocent, but bland. It looked almost demure. It looked as
if you could walk on it It looked so still that they did not
realise it possessed motion until they came to the first
bridge. There was a ditch under the bridge, a small stream*
but ditch and stream were both invisible now, indicated
only by the rows of cypress and bramble which marked its
course. Here they both saw and heard movement — the slow
profound eastward and upstream (“It’s running backward,**
one convict said quietly.) set of the still rigid surface, from
beneath which came a deep faint subaquean rumble which
(though none in the truck could have made the comparison)
sounded like a subway train passing far beneath the street
and which implied a terrific and secret speed. It was as if
the water itself were in three strata, separate and distinct,
the bland and unhurried surface bearing a frothy scum and
a miniature flotsam of twigs and screening as though by
vicious calculation the rush and fury of the flood itself, and
beneath this in turn the original stream, trickle, murmuring
along in the opposite direction, following undisturbed and
unaware its appointed course and serving its Lilliputian
end, like a thread of ants between the rails on which an
express train passes, they (the ants) as unaware of the
power and fury as if it were a cyclone crossing Saturn.

26 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Now there was water on both sides of the road and now f
as if once they had become aware of movement in the
water the water seemed to have given over deception and
concealment, they seemed to be able to watch it rising np
the flanks of the dump; trees which a few miles back had
stood on tall trunks above the water now seemed to burst
from the surface at the level of the lower branches like
decorative shrubs on barbered lawns. The truck passed a
Negro cabin. The water was up to the window ledges. A
woman clutching two children squatted on the ridgepole, a
man and a half-grown youth, standing waist-deep, were
hoisting a squealing pig onto the slanting roof of a bam, on
the ridgepole of which sat a row of chickens and a turkey.
Near the bam was a haystack on which a cow stood tied by
a rope to the center pole and bawling steadily; a yelling
Negro boy on a saddleless mule which he flogged steadily,
his legs clutching the mule’s barrel and his body leaned to
the drag of a rope attached to a second mule, approached
the haystack, splashing and floundering. The woman on the
housetop began to shriek at the passing truck, her voice
carrying faint and melodious across the brown water, be-
coming fainter and fainter as the truck passed and went on,
ceasing at last, whether because of distance or because she
had stopped screaming those in the truck did not know.

Then the road vanished. There was no perceptible slant
to it yet it had slipped abruptly beneath the brown surface
with no ripple, no ridgy demarcation, like a flat thin blade
slipped obliquely into flesh by a delicate hand, annealed
into the water without disturbance, as if it had existed so
for years, had been built that way. The truck stopped. The
trusty descended from the cab and came back and dragged
two shovels from among their feet, the blades clashing
against the serpentining of the chain about their ankles.
“What Is it?’* one said. “What are you fixing to do?” The

Old Mem 87

trusty didn’t answer. He returned to the cab, from which
one of the guards had descended, without his shotgun. He
and the trusty, both in hip boots and each carrying a
shovel, advanced into the water, gingerly, probing and feel-
ing ahead with the shovel handles. The same convict spoke
again. He was a middle-aged man with a wild thatch of
iron-gray hair and a slightly mad face. “What the hell are
they doing?” he said. Again nobody answered him. The
truck moved, on into the water, behind the guard and the
trusty, beginning to push ahead of itself a thick slow viscid
ridge of chocolate water. Then the gray-haired convict be-
gan to scream. “God damn it, unlock the chain!” He began
to struggle, thrashing violently about him, striking at the
men nearest him until he reached the cab, the roof of which
he now hammered on with his fists, screaming. “God damn
it, unlock us! Unlock usl Son of a bitch!” he screamed, ad-
dressing no one. “They’re going to drown usl Unlock the
chain!” But for ail the answer he got the men within radius
of his voice might have been dead. The truck crawled on,
the guard and the trusty feeling out the road ahead with the
reversed shovels, the second guard at the wheel, the twenty-
two convicts packed like sardines into the truck bed and
padlocked by the ankles to the body of the truck itself.
They crossed another bridge— two delicate and paradoxical
iron railings slanting out of the water, travelling parallel to
it for a distance, then slanting down into it again with an
outrageous quality almost significant yet apparently mean-
ingless like something in a dream not quite nightmare. The
truck crawled on.

Along toward noon they came to a town, their destina-
tion. The streets were paved; now the wheels of the truck
made a sound like tearing silk. Moving faster now, the
guard and the trusty in the cab again, the truck even had a
flight bone in its teeth, its bow-wave spreading beyond the

88 WILLIAM FAULKNER

submerged sidewalks and across the adjacent lawns, lap-
ping against the stoops and porches of houses where people
stood among piles of furniture. They passed through the
business district; a man in hip boots emerged knee-deep in
water from a store, dragging a flatrbottomed skiff contain*
fag a steel safe.

At last they reached the railroad. It crossed die street at
light angles, cutting the town in two. It was on a dump, a
levee, also, eight or ten feet above the town itself; the street
tan blankly Into it and turned at right angles beside a
cotton compress and a loading platform on stilts at the
level of a freight-car door. On this platform was a khaki
army tent and a uniformed National Guard sentry with a
rifle and bandolier.

The truck turned and crawled out of the water and
up the ramp which cotton wagons used and where trucks
and private cars filled with household goods came and
unloaded onto the platform. They were unlocked from
the chain in the truck and shackled ankle to ankle in
pairs they mounted the platform and into an apparently
Inextricable jumble of beds and trunks, gas and electric
stoves, radios and tables and chairs and framed pictures
which a chain of Negroes under the eye of an unshaven
white man in muddy corduroy and hip boots carried piece
by piece into the compress, at the door of which another
guardsman stood with his rifle, they (the convicts) not
stopping here but herded on by the two guards with their
shotguns, into the dim and cavernous building where
among the piled heterogeneous furniture the ends of cot-
ton bales and the mirrors on dressers and sideboards
gleamed with an identical mute and unreflecting concen-
tration of pallid light

They passed on through, onto the loading platform
where the army tent and the first sentry were. They

Old Man 89

waited here. Nobody told them for what nor why. While
the two guards talked with the sentry before the tent the
convicts sat in a line along the edge of the platform like
buzzards on a fence, their shackled feet dangling above
the brown motionless flood out of which the railroad
embankment rose, pristine and intact, in a kind of para*
clerical denial and repudiation of change and portent,
not talking, just looking quietly across the track to where
the other half of the amputated town seemed to float,
house shrub and tree, ordered and pageant-like and with*
out motion, upon the limitless liquid plain beneath the
thick gray sky.

After a while the other four trucks from the Farm
arrived. They came up, bunched closely, radiator to tail
light, with their four separate sounds of tearing silk and
vanished beyond the compress. Presently the ones on
the platform heard the feet, die mute clashing of the
shackles, the first truckload emerged from the compress,
the second, the third; there were more than a hundred
of them now in their bed-ticking overalls and jumpers
and fifteen or twenty guards with rifles and shotguns.
The first lot rose and they mingled, paired, twinned by
their clanking and clashing umbilicals; then it began to
rain, a slow steady gray drizzle like November instead
of May. Yet not one of them made any move toward the
open door of the compress. They did not even look
toward it, with longing or hope or without it. If they
thought at all, they doubtless knew that the available
space in it would be needed for furniture, even if it
were not already filled. Or perhaps they knew that, even
if there were room in it, it would not be for them, not
that the guards would wish them to get wet but that the
guards would not think about getting them out of the
rain. So they just stopped talking and with their jumper

90 WILLIAM FAULKNER

collars tamed ap and shackled in braces like dogs at a
field trial they stood, immobile, patient, almost rumi-
nant, their backs turned to the rain as sheep and cattle
do.

After another while they became aware that the num-
ber of soldiers had increased to a dozen or more, warm
and dry beneath rubberised ponchos, there was an offi-
cer with a pistol at his belt, then and without making
any move toward it, they began to smell food and, turn-
ing to look, saw an army field kitchen set up just inside
the compress door. But they made no move, they waited
until they were herded into line, they inched forward,
their heads lowered and patient in the rain, and received
each a bowl of stew, a mug of coffee, two slices of bread.
They ate this in the rain. They did not sit down because
the platform was wet, they squatted on their heels as
country men do, hunching forward, trying to shield the
bowls and mugs into which nevertheless the rain splashed
steadily as into miniature ponds and soaked, invisible
and soundless, into the bread.

After they had stood on the platform for three hours,
a train came for them. Those nearest the edge saw it,
watched it — a passenger coach apparently running un-
der its own power and trailing a cloud of smoke from
no visible stack, a cloud which did not rise but instead
shifted slowly and heavily aside and lay upon the surface
of the aqueous earth with a quality at once weightless and
completely spent It came up and stopped, a single old-
fashioned open-ended wooden car coupled to the nose of a
pushing switch engine considerably smaller. They were
herded into it, crowding forward to the other end where
there was a small cast-iron stove. There was no fire in it,
nevertheless they crowded about it — the cold and voiceless
lump of iron stained with fading tobacco and hovered

Old Mm 91

about by the ghosts of a thousand Sunday excursions to
Memphis or Moorhead and return — the peanuts, the ba-
nanas, the soiled garments of infants — huddling, shoving
for places near it “Come on, come on,” one of the guards
shouted. “Sit down, now.” At last three of the guards, lay-
ing aside their guns, came among them and broke up the
huddle, driving them back and into seats.

There were not enough seats for alL The others stood
in the aisle, they stood braced, they heard the air hiss
out of the released brakes, the engine whistled four blasts,
the car came into motion with a snapping jerk; the plat-
form, the compress fled violently as the train seemed to
transpose from immobility to full speed with that same
quality of unreality with which it had appeared, running
backward cow though with the engine in front where be-
fore it had moved forward but with the engine behind.

When the railroad in its turn ran beneath the surface
of the water, the convicts did not even know it They felt
the train stop, they heard the engine blow a long blast
which walled away unechoed across the waste, wild and
forlorn, and they were not even curious; they sat or
stood behind the rain-streaming windows as the train
crawled on again, feeling its way as the truck had while
the brown water swirled between the trucks and among
the spokes of the driving wheels and lapped in cloudy
steam against the dragging fire-filled belly of the engine;
again it blew four short harsh blasts filled with the wild
triumph and defiance yet also with repudiation and even
farewell, as if the articulated steel itself knew it did not
dare stop and would not be able to return. Two hours
later in the twilight they saw through the streaming
windows a burning plantation house. Juxtaposed to no-
where and neighbored by nothing it stood, a clear steady
pyre-like flame rigidly fleeing its own reflection, burning

92 WILLIAM FAULKNER

in the dusk above the watery desolation with a quality
paradoxical, outrageous and bizarre.

Some time after dark the train stopped. The convicts
did not know where they were. They did not ask. They
would no more have thought of asking where they were
than they would have asked why and what for. They
couldn’t even see, since the car was unlighted and the
windows fogged on the outside by rain and on the inside
by the engendered heat of the packed bodies. AH they
could see was a milky and sourceless flick and glare of
flashlights. They could hear shouts and commands, then
the guards inside the car began to shout; they were
herded to their feet and toward the exit, the ankle chains
clashing and clanking. They descended into a fierce hiss-
ing of steam, through ragged wisps of it blowing past
the car. Laid-to alongside the train and resembling a
train itself was a thick blunt motor launch to which was
attached a string of skiffs and flat boats. There were
more soldiers; the flashlights played on the rifle barrels
and bandolier buckles and flicked and glinted on the
ankle chains of the convicts as they stepped gingerly
down into knee-deep water and entered the boats; now
car and engine both vanished completely in steam as
the crew began dumping the fire from the firebox.

After another hour they began to see lights ahead — a
faint wavering row of red pin-pricks extending along the
horizon and apparently hanging low in the sky. But
it took almost another hour to reach them while the con-
victs squatted in the skiffs, huddled into the soaked gar-
ments (they no longer felt the rain any more at all as
separate drops) and watched the lights draw nearer and
nearer until at last the crest of the levee defined itself;
now they could discern a row of army tents stretching
along it and people squatting about the fires, the waver-

Old Alan 93

fag reflections from which, stretching across tho water,
revealed an Involved mass of other skiffs tied against
the flank of the levee which sow stood high and dark
overhead. Flashlights glared and winked along the base,
among the tethered skiffs; the launch, silent now, drifted
in.

When they reached the top of the levee they could
see the long line of khaki tents. Interspersed with fires
about which people — men, women and children, Negro
and white— crouched or stood among shapeless bales at
clothing, their heads turning, their eyeballs glinting in
the firelight as they looked quietly at the striped garments
and the chains; further down the levee, huddled together
too though untethered, was a drove of mules and two or
three cows. Then the taller convict became conscious of
another sound. He did not begin to hear it all at once, he
suddenly became aware that he had been hearing it all
the time, a sound so much beyond all his experience and
his powers of assimilation that up to this point he had been
as oblivious of it as an ant or a flea might be of the sound
of the avalanche on which it rides; he had been travelling
upon water since early afternoon and for seven years now
he had run his plow and harrow and planter within the very
shadow of the levee on which he now stood, but this pro-
found deep whisper which came from the further side of it
he did not at once recognise. He stopped. The fine of con-
victs behind jolted into him like a line of freight cars stop-
ping, with an iron clashing like cars. “Get onl” a guard
shouted.

“What’s that?” the convict said. A Negro man squat-
ting before the nearest fire answered him:

“Daf S him. Dat’s de Ole Man.”

“The old man?” the convict said.

“Get on! Get on up there!” the guard shouted. They

94 WILLIAM FAULKNER

went on; they passed another huddle of mules, the eye-
balls rolling too, the long morose faces turning into and
out of the firelight; they passed them and reached a
section of empty tents, the light pup tents of a military
campaign, made to hold two men. The guards herded
the convicts into them, three brace of shackled men to each
tent

They crawled in on all fours, like dogs into cramped
kennels, and settled down. Presently the tent became
warm from their bodies. Then they became quiet and
then all of them could hear it, they lay listening to the
bass whisper deep* strong and powerful. “The old man7”
the train-robber convict said.

“Yah,” another said. “He dont have to brag.”

At dawn the guards waked them by kicking the soles
of the projecting feet Opposite the muddy landing and
the huddle of skiffs an army field kitchen was set up,
already they could smell the coffee. But the taller con-
vict at least, even though he had had but one meal yes-
terday and that at noon in the rain, did not move at once
toward the food. Instead and for the first time he looked
at the River within whose shadow he had spent the last
seven years of his life but had never seen before; he stood
in quiet and amazed surmise and looked at the rigid steel-
colored surface not broken into waves but merely slightly
undulant It stretched from the levee on which he stood,
further than he could see— a slowly and heavily roiling
chocolate-frothy expanse broken only by a thin line a mile
away as fragile in appearance as a single hair, which after a
moment he recognised. Its another levee , he thought
quietly. Thafs what we look like from there. Thafs what
I am standing on looks like from there. He was prodded
from the rear; a guard’s voice carried forward: “Go onl Go
on! You’ll have plenty of time to look at thatl”

Old Man 95

They received die same stew and coffee and bread as
die day before; they squatted again with their bowk and
mugs as yesterday, though it was not raining yet. During
the night an intact wooden bam had floated up. It now
lay jammed by the current against the levee while a crowd
of Negroes swarmed over it, ripping off the shingles and
planks and carrying diem up the bank; eating steadily and
without haste, die taller convict watched the bam dissolve
rapidly down to the very water-line exactly as a dead fly
vanished beneath the moiling industry of a swarm of ants.

They finished eating. Then it began to rain again, as
upon a signal, while they stood or squatted in their harsh
garments which had not dried out during the night but
had merely become slightly wanner than the air. Presently
they were haled to their feet and told off into two groups,
one of which was armed from a stack of mud-clogged picks
and shovels nearby, and marched away up the levee. A
little later the motor launch with its train of skiffs came up
across what was, fifteen feet beneath its keel, probably a
cotton field, die skiffs loaded to the gunwales with Negroes
and a scattering of white people nursing bundles on their
laps. When the engine hint off the faint pKnfcfag of a guitar
came across the water. The skiffs warped in and unloaded;
the convicts watched the men and women and children
straggle qp die muddy slope, carrying heavy towsacks and
b und les wrapped in quilts. The sound of the guitar had
not ceased and now the convicts saw him — a young;
black, lean-hipped man, he guitar thing by & piece of
cotton plowiine about his neck. He mounted the levee,
still picking it. He carried nothing else, no food, no change
of clothes, not even a coat.

The taller convict was so busy watching this hat he
did not hear he guard until he guard stood directly

9 6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

beside him shooting Ids name. “Wake npl” die guard
shouted. “Can yon fellows paddle a boat?”

“Paddle a boat where?" the taller convict said.

"In the water," the guard said. “Where in bed do you
think?"

“I aint going to paddle no boat nowhere out yonder,"
the tall convict said. Jerking his bead toward the invisible
river beyond the levee behind him.

“No, It’s on this ride," the gnard said. Ho stooped
swiftly and unlocked the chain which Joined the tall con-
vict and the plump hairless one. “It’s just down the road
a piece." He rose. The two convicts followed him down
to the boats. “Follow them telephone poles until you
come to a filling station. Yon can tell it, the roof is still
above water. It’s on a bayou and yon can ted die bayou
because the tops of die trees are sticking 19. Follow the
bayou uadi you come to a cypress snag with a woman in
It Pick her up and then cut straight back west until you
come to a cotton house with a fellow sitting on the ridge-
pole—” He turned, looking at the two convicts, who stood
perfectly still, looking first at the skid and then at the
water with intense sobriety. “Well? What are you waiting
for?"

“I cant row a boat," the plump convict said.

“Then it’s high time you learned," the guard said. “Get

In."

The tad convict shoved the other forward. “Get in,"
be said. “That water aint going to hurt you. Aint nobody
going to make you take a bath."

As, the plump one in die bow and the other in the
stem, they shoved away from the levee, they saw other
pair* being unshackle d and manning the other skiffs. “I
wonder how many more of them fellows are seeing this
much water for the first time in their lives too,” the tad

Old Man 97

convict said. The other did not answer. He knelt in the
bottom of the skiff, pecking gingerly at the water now and
then with his paddle. The very shape of his thick soft back
seemed to wear that expression of wary and tense concern.

Some time after midnight a rescue boat filled to the
guard rail with homeless men and women and children
docked at Vicksburg. It was a steamer, shallow of draft;
all day long it had poked up and down cypress- and gum*
choked bayous and across cotton fields (where at times
instead of swimming it waded) gathering its sorry cargo
from the tops of houses and bams and even out of trees,
and now it warped into that mushroom city of the forlorn
and despairing where kerosene flares smoked in the drizzle
and hurriedly strung electrics glared upon the bayonets of
martial policemen and the Red Cross brassards of doctors
and nurses and canteen-workers. The bluff overhead was
almost solid with tents, yet still there were more people
than shelter for them; they sat or lay, single and by whole
families, under what shelter they could find or sometimes
under the rain itself, in the little death of profound exhaus-
tion while the doctors and the nurses and the soldiers
stepped over and around and among them.

Among the first to disembark was one of the peniten-
tiary deputy wardens, followed closely by the plump con-
vict and another white man — a small man with a gaunt
unshaven wan face still wearing an expression of incredu-
lous outrage. The deputy warden seemed to know exactly
where he wished to go. Followed dosely by his two com-
panions he threaded his way swiftly among the piled for*
niture and the sleeping bodies and stood presently in a
fiercely lighted and hastily established temporary office, al-
most a military post of command in fact, where the Warden
of the Penitentiary sat with two army officers wearing

98 WILLIAM FAULKNER

majors* leaves. The deputy warden spoke without pre-
amble. “We lost a man,” he said. He called the tall con-
vict’s name.

“Lost him?” the Warden said.

“Yah. Drowned.” Without turning his head he spoke
to the plump convict “Tell him,” he said.

“He was the one that said he could row a boat,” the
plump convict said. “I never. I told him myself — ” he
indicated the deputy warden with a jerk of his head “ — I
couldn’t So when we got to the bayou — ”

“What’s this?” the Warden said.

“The launch brought word in,” the deputy warden said.
“Woman in a cypress snag on the bayou, then this fellow
— he indicated the third man; the Warden and the two
officers looked at the third man “ — on a cotton house.
Never had room in the launch to pick them up. Go on.”

“So we come to where the bayou was,” the plump con-
vict continued in a voice perfectly fiat, without any inflec-
tion whatever. “Then the boat got away from him. I dont
know what happened. I was just sitting there because he
was so positive he could row a boat. I never saw any cur-
rent Just all of a sudden the boat whirled clean around
and begun to run fast backward like it was hitched to a
train and it whirled around again and I happened to look
up and there was a limb right over my head and I grabbed
it just in time and that boat was snatched out from under
me like you’d snatch off a sock and I saw it one time more
upside down and that fellow that said he knew all about
rowing holding to it with one hand and still holding the
paddle in the other-—” He ceased. There was no dying fall
to his voice, it just ceased and the convict stood looking
quietly at a half-full quart of whiskey sitting on the table.

•How do you know he’s drowned?” the Warden said

Old Man 99

to the deputy. “How do you know he didn’t Just sec his
chance to escape, and took it?”

“Escape where?” the other said. “The whole Delta’s
flooded. There’s fifteen foot of water for fifty miles, dean
back to the hills. And that boat was upside down,”

“That fellow’s drowned,” the plump convict said. “You
dont need to worry about him. He's got his pardon; it
wont cramp nobody’s hand signing it, neither.”

“And nobody else saw him?” the Warden said. “What
about the woman in the tree?”

“I dont know,” the deputy said. “I aint found her yet
I reckon some other boat picked her up. But this is the
fellow on the cotton house.”

Again the Warden and the two officers looked at the
third man, at the gaunt, unshaven wild face in which an
old terror, an old blending of fear and impotence and rage
still lingered. “He never came for you?” the Warden said.
“You never saw him?”

“Never nobody came for me,” the refugee said. He
began to tremble though at first he spoke quietly enough.
“I set there on that sonabitching cotton house, expecting
hit to go any minute. I saw that launch and them boats
come up and they never had no room for me. Full of
bastard niggers and one of them setting there playing a
guitar but there wasn’t no room for me. A guitar!” he
cried; now he began to scream, trembling slavering, his
face twitching and jerking. “Room for a bastard nigger
guitar but not for me—”

“Steady now,” the Warden said. “Steady now.”

“Give him a drink ” one of the officers said. The Warden
poured the drink. The deputy handed it to the refugee,
who took the glass in both jerking hands and tried to raise
it to his mouth. They watched him for perhaps twenty see*
onds, then the deputy took the glass from him and held it

IOO WILLIAM FAULKNER

to his lips while he gulped, though even then a thin trickle
ran from each comer of his mouth, into the stubble on
his chin.

“So we picked him and — the deputy called the plump
convict’s name now “ — both up just before dark and come
on In. But that other fellow is gone.”

“Yes,” the Warden said. “Well. Here I haven’t lost a
prisoner in ten years, and now, like this — Fm sending you
back to the Farm tomorrow. Have his family notified, and
his discharge papers filled out at once.”

“All right,” the deputy said. “And listen, chief. He
wasn’t a bad fellow and maybe he never had no business
in that boat. Only he did say he could paddle one. Listen.
Suppose I write on his discharge. Drowned while trying to
save lives in the great flood of nineteen twenty-seven, and
send it down for the Governor to sign it. It will be some-
thing nice for his folks to have, to hang on the wall when
neighbors come in or something. Maybe they will even
give his folks a cash bonus because after all they sent him
to the Farm to raise cotton, not to fool around in a boat
in a flood.”

“All right,” the Warden said. “I’ll see about it. The
main thing is to get his name off the books as dead be-
fore some politician tries to collect his food allowance.”

“All right,” the deputy said. He turned and herded his
companions out In the drizzling darkness again he said
to the plump convict: “Well, your partner beat you. He’s
free. He’s done served his time out but you’ve got a right
far piece to go yet”

“Yah,” the plump convict said. ‘Tree. He can have it*

As the short convict had testified, the tall one, when
he returned to the surface, still retained what the short

Old Man ioi

one called the paddle. He dong to it, not Instinctively
against the time when he would be back inside the
boat and would need it, because for a time he did not be-
lieve be would ever regain the skiff or anything else that
would support him, but because he did not have time to
think about turning it loose. Things had moved too fast
for him. He had not been warned, he had felt the first
snatching tug of the current, he had seen the stiff begin
to spin and his companion vanish violently upward like in a
translation out of Isaiah, then he himself was in the water,
struggling against the drag of the paddle which he did not
know he still held each time he fought back to the surface
and grasped at the spinning skiff which at one Instant was
ten feet away and the next poised above his head as though
about to brain him, until at last he grasped the stem, the
drag of his body becoming a rudder to the skiff, the two
of them, man and boat and with the paddle perpendicular
above them like a jackstaff, vanishing from the view of the
short convict (who had vanished from that of the tall one
with the same celerity though in a vertical direction) like
a tableau snatched offstage intact with violent and in-
credible speed.

He was now in the channel of a dough, a bayou, in
which until today no current had run probably since the
old subterranean outrage which had created the country.
There was plenty of current in it now though; from his
trough behind the stem he seemed to see the trees and sky
rushing past with vertiginous speed, looking down at him
between the gouts of cold yellow in lugubrious and mourn-
ful amazement But they were fixed and secure in some-
thing; he thought of rind, he remembered in an instant of
despairing rage the firm earth fixed and founded strong and
cemented fast and stable forever by the generations of
laborious sweat, somewhere beneath him, beyond die reach

102 WILLIAM FAULKNER

of his feet, when, and again without waning, the stem of
the drift struck him a stunning blow across the bridge of
his nose. The instinct which had caused him to cling to it
sow caused him to fling the paddle into the boat in order
to grasp the gunwale with both hands just as the skiff
pivoted and spun away again. With both hands free he
now dragged himself over the stern and lay prone on his
face, streaming with blood and water and panting, not with
exhaustion but with that furious rage which is terror**
aftermath.

But he had to get up at once because he believed he
had come much faster (and so farther) than he had. So
he rose, out of the watery scarlet puddle in which he had
lain, streaming, the soaked denim heavy as iron on his
limbs, the black hair plastered to his skull, the blood-
infused water streaking his jumper, and dragged his
forearm gingerly and hurriedly across his lower face
and glanced at it then grasped the paddle and began to
try to swing the skiff back upstream. It did not even
occur to him that he did not know where his companion
was, in which tree among all which he had passed or
might pass* He did not even speculate on that for the
reason that he knew so incontestably that the other was
upstream from him, and after his recent experience the
mere connotation of the term upstream carried a sense
of such violence and force and speed that the concep-
tion of it as other than a straight line was something
which die intelligence, reason, simply refused to harbor,
like the notion of a rifle bullet the width of a cotton
field*

The bow began to swing back upstream. It turned
readily, it outpaced the aghast and outraged instant in
which he realised it was swinging far too easily, it had
swung on over the arc and lay broadside to the current

Old Man 103

and began again that vicious spinning while he sat, his
teeth bared in his bloody streaming face while his spent
arms flailed the impotent paddle at the water, that
innocent-appearing medium which at one time had held
him in iron-like and shifting convolutions like an ana*
conda yet which now seemed to offer no more resistance
to the thrust of his urge and need than so much air, like
air; the boat which had threatened him and at last
actually struck him in the face with the shocking vio-
lence of a mule’s hoof now seemed to poise weightless
upon it like a thistle bloom, spinning like a wind vano
while he flailed at the water and thought of, envisioned,
his companion safe, inactive and at ease in the tree with
nothing to do but wait, musing with impotent and terri-
fied fury upon that arbitrariness of human affairs which
had abrogated to the one the secure tree and to the other
the hysterical and unmanageable boat for the very rea-
son that it knew that he alone of the two of them would
make any attempt to return and rescue his companion*
The skiff had paid off and now ran with the current
again. It seemed again to spring from immobility into
incredible speed, and he thought he must already bo
miles away from where his companion had quitted him,
though actually he had merely described a big circle
since getting back into the skiff, and the object (a clump
of cypress trees choked by floating logs and debris)
which the skiff was now about to strike was the same
one it had careened into before when the stem had
struck him. He didn’t know this because he had not yet
ever looked higher than the bow of the boat. He didn’t
look higher now, he just saw that he was going to strike;
he seemed to feel run through the very insentient fabric
of the skiff a current of eager gleeful vicious incor-
rigible wilfulness; and. he who had never ceased to flail

104 WILLIAM FAULKNER

at the bland treacherous water with what he had be*
lieved to be the limit of his strength now from some*
where, some ultimate absolute reserve, produced a final
measure of endurance, will to endure which adumbrated
mere muscle and nerves, continuing to flail the paddle
right up to the instant of striking, completing one last
reach thrust and recover out of pure desperate reflex, as
a man slipping on ice reaches for his hat and money*
pocket, as the skiff struck and hurled him once more
fiat on his face in the bottom of it.

This time he did not get up at once. He lay flat on his
face, slightly spread-eagled and in an attitude almost
peaceful, a kind of abject meditation. He would have
to get up sometime, he knew that, just as all life consists
of having to get up sooner or later and then having to
lie down again sooner or later after a while. And he
was not exactly exhausted and he was not particularly
without hope and he did not especially dread getting
up. It merely seemed to him that he had accidentally
been caught in a situation in which time and environ-
ment, not himself, was mesmerised; he was being toyed
with by a current of water going nowhere, beneath a
day which would wane toward no evening; when it was
done with him it would spew him back into the com-
paratively safe world he had been snatched violently
out of and in the meantime it did not much matter just
what he did or did not do. So he lay on his face, now not
only feeling but hearing the strong quiet rustling of the
current on the underside of the planks, for a while
longer. Then he raised his head and this rime touched
his palm gingerly to his face and looked at the blood
again, then he sat up onto his heels and leaning over
the gunwale he pinched his nostrils between thumb and
finger and expelled a gout of blood and was in the act

Old Alan 105

of wiping his fingers on his thigh when a voice slightly
above his line of sight said quietly, “It’s taken you a
while,” and he who up to this moment had had neither
reason nor time to raise his eyes higher than the bows
looked up and saw, sitting in a tree and looking at him,
a woman. She was not ten feet away. She sat on the
lowest limb of one of the trees holding the jam he had
grounded on, in a calico wrapper and an army private’s
tunic and a sunbonnet, a woman whom he did not even
bother to examine since that first startled glance had
been ample to reveal to him all the generations of her
life and background, who could have been his sister if
he had a sister, his wife if he had not entered the peni-
tentiary at an age scarcely out of adolescence and some
years younger than that at which even his prolific and
monogamous kind married — a woman who sat clutching
the trunk of the tree, her stockingless feet in a pair of
man’s unlaced brogans less than a yard from the water,
who was very probably somebody’s sister and quite
certainly (or certainly should have been) somebody’s
wife, though this too he had entered the penitentiary
too young to have had more than mere theoretical female
experience to discover yet “I thought for a minute you
wasn’t aiming to come back.”

“Come back?”

“After the first time. After you run into this brush
pfle the first time and got into the boat and went on.”
He looked about, touching his face tenderly again; it
could very well be the same place where the boat had
hit him in the face.

“Yah,” he said. “Fm here now though.”

“Could you maybe get the boat a little closer? I taken
a right sharp strain getting up here; maybe I better . . .”
He was not listening; he had just discovered that the

1 06 WILLIAM FAULKNEE

paddle was gone; this time when the skiff hurled him
forward he had flung the paddle not into it but beyond
it. “It’s right there in them brush tops,” the woman said,
•‘You can get it. Here. Catch a holt of this.” It was a
grapevine. It had grown up into the tree and the flood
had torn the roots loose. She had taken a turn with it
about her upper body; she now loosed it and swung
it out until he could grasp it. Holding to the end of the
vine he warped the skiff around the end of the jam,
picking up the paddle, and warped the skiff on be-
neath the limb and held it and now he watched her
move, gather herself heavily and carefully to descend—
that heaviness which was not painful but just excruciat-
ingly careful, that profound and almost lethargic awk-
wardness which added nothing to the sum of that first
aghast amazement which had served already for the
catafalque of invincible dream since even in durance
he had continued (and even with the old avidity, even
though they had caused his downfall) to consume the
impossible pulp-printed fables carefully censored and
as carefully smuggled into the petitentiary; and who to
say what Helen, what living Garbo, he had not dreamed
of rescuing from what craggy pinnacle or dragoned keep
when he and his companion embarked in the skiff. He
watched her, he made no further effort to help her
beyond holding the skiff savagely steady while she low-
ered herself from the limb — the entire body, the de-
formed swell of belly bulging the calico, suspended by
its arms, thinking, And this is what / get . This, out of
all the female meat that walks, is what l have to be
caught in a runaway boat with.

“Where’s that cottonhouse?” he said,

“Cottonhouse?”

“With that fellow on it. The other one.”

Old Man 107

**1 dont know. It’s a right smart of cottonhouses around
here. With folks on them too, I reckon.” She was ex-
amining him. “You’re bloody as a hog,” she said. “Yon
look like a convict.”

“Yah,” he said, snarled. “I feel like I done already
been hung. Well, I got to pick up my pardner and then
find that cottonhouse.” He cast off. That is, he released
his hold on the vine. That was all he had to do, for even
while the bow of the skiff hung high on the log jam and
even while he held it by the vine in the comparatively
dead water behind the jam, he felt steadily and con-
stantly the whisper, the strong purring power of the
water just one inch beyond the frail planks on which
he squatted and which, as soon as he released the vine*
took charge of the skiff not with one powerful clutch but
in a series of touches light, tentative, and catlike; he
realised now that he had entertained a sort of founda-
tionless hope that the added weight might make the
skiff more controllable. During the first moment or two
he had a wild (and still foundationless) belief that it
had; he had got the head upstream and managed to
hold it so by terrific exertion continued even after he
discovered that they were travelling straight enough but
stem-first and continued somehow even after the bow
began to wear away and swing: the old irresistible move-
ment which he knew well by now, too well to fight against
it, so that he let the bow swing on downstream with the
hope of utilising the skiff’s own momentum to bring it
through the full circle and so upstream again, the skiff
travelling broadside then bow-first then broadside again*
diagonally across the channel, toward the other wall of
submerged trees; it began to flee beneath him with terrific
speed, they were in an eddy but did not know it; he had
no time to draw conclusions or even wonder; he crouched*

108 WILLIAM FAULKNER

his teeth bared in his blood-caked and swollen face, his
lungs bursting, flailing at the water while the trees stooped
hugely down at him. The skiff struck, spun, struck again;
the woman half lay in the bow, clutching the gunwales,
as if she were trying to crouch behind her own pregnancy;
he banged now not at the water but at the living sap-
blooded wood with the paddle, his desire now not to go
anywhere, reach any destination, but just to keep the
skiff from beating itself to fragments against the tree
trunks. Then something exploded, this time against the
back of his head, and stooping trees and dizzy water, the
woman’s face and all, fled together and vanished in bright
soundless flash and glare.

An hour later the skiff came slowly up an old logging
road and so out of the bottom, the forest, and into (or
onto) a cottonfield — a gray and limitless desolation now
free of turmoil, broken only by a thin line of telephone
poles like a wading millipede. The woman was now
paddling, steadily and deliberately, with that curious
lethargic care, while the convict squatted, his head bo-
tween his knees, trying to stanch the fresh and apparently
inexhaustible flow of blood from his nose with handfuls
of water. The woman ceased paddling, the skiff drifted
on, slowing, while she looked about “We’re done out,”
she said.

The convict raised his head and also looked about
*Out where?”

*T thought maybe you might know.”

“I dont even know where I used to be. Even if I
knowed which way was north, I wouldn’t know if that
was where I wanted to go.” He cupped another handful
of water to his face and lowered his hand and regarded
the resulting crimson marbling on his palm, not with
dejection, not with concern, but with a kind of sardonic

Old Man 109

and vicious bemusement The woman watched the back
of his head.

“We got to get somewhere/*

“Dont I know it? A fellow on a cottonhouse. Another
in a tree. And now that tiling in your lap.**

“It wasn’t due yet Maybe it was having to climb
that tree quick yesterday, and having to set in it all
night. I’m doing the best I can. But we better get some-
where soon.”

“Yah,” the convict said. “I thought I wanted to get
somewhere too and I aint had no luck at it You pick
out a place to get to now and we’ll try yours. Gimme
that oar.” The woman passed him the paddle. The boat
was a double-ender; he had only to turn around.

“Which way you fixing to go?” the woman said.

“Never you mind that You just keep on holding on.**
lie began to paddle, on across the cottonfield. It began
to rain again, though not hard at first “Yah,” he said.
“Ask the boat I been in it since breakfast and I aint
never knowed, where I aimed to go or where I was going
either.”

That was about one oclock. Toward the end of the
afternoon the skiff (they were in a channel of gome sort
again, they had been in it for some time; they had got
into it before they knew it and too late to get out again,
granted there had been any reason to get out, as, to the
convict anyway, there was certainly none and the fact
that their speed had increased again was reason enough
to stay in it) shot out upon a broad expanse of debris-
filled water which the convict recognised as a river and,
from its size, the Yazoo River though it was little enough
he had seen of this country which he had not quitted
for so much as one single day in the last seven years of
his life. What he did not know was that it was now

IIO WILLIAM FAULKNER

running backward. So as soon as the drift of the skiff
indicated the set of the current, he began to paddle in
that direction which he believed to be downstream, where
he knew there were towns — Yazoo City, and as a last
resort, Vicksburg, if his luck was that bad, if not, smaller
towns whose names he did not know but where there
would be people, houses, something, anything he might
reach and surrender his charge to and turn his back on
her forever, on all pregnant and female life forever and
return to that monastic existence of shotguns and shackles
where he would be secure from it Now, with the immi-
nence of habitations, release from her, he did not even
hate her. When he looked upon the swelling and un-
manageable body before him it seemed to him that it was
not the woman at all but rather a separate demanding
threatening inert yet living mass of which both he and
she were equally victims; thinking, as he had been for
the last three or four hours, of that minute’s — nay, sec-
ond’s — aberration of eye or hand which would suffice to
precipitate her into the water to be dragged down to
death by that senseless millstone which in its turn would
not even have to feel agony, he no longer felt any glow
of revenge toward her as its custodian, he felt sorry for
her as he would for the living timber in a barn which had
to be burned to rid itself of ver min .

He paddled on, helping the current, steadily and
strongly, with a calculated husbandry of effort, toward
what he believed was downstream, towns, people, some-
thing to stand upon, while from time to time the woman
raised herself to bail the accumulated rain from the
skiff. It was raining steadily now though still not hard,
still without passion, the sky, the day itself dissolving
without grief; the skiff moved in a nimbus, an aura erf
gray gauze which merged almost without demarcation

Old Man m

with the roiling spittle-frothed debris-choked water. Now
the day, the light, definitely began to end and the convict
permitted himself an extra notch or two of effort be*
cause it suddenly seemed to him that the speed of the
skiff had lessened. This was actually the case though the
convict did not know it. He merely took it as a phe-
nomenon of the increasing obfuscation, or at most as a
result of the long day’s continuous effort with no food 9
complicated by the ebbing and fluxing phases of anxiety
and impotent rage at his absolutely gratuitous predica-
ment So he stepped up his stroke a beat or so, not from
alarm but on the contrary, since he too had received that
lift from the mere presence of a known stream, a river
known by its ineradicable name to generations of men
who had been drawn to live beside it as man always
has been drawn to dwell beside water, even before he
had a name for water and fire, drawn to the living water,
the course of his destiny and his actual physical appear*
ance rigidly coerced and postulated by it. So he was not
alarmed. He paddled on, upstream without knowing it,
unaware that all the water which for forty hours now
had been pouring through the levee break to the north
was somewhere ahead of him, on its way back to th<»
River,

It was full dark now. That is, night had complete^
come, the gray dissolving sky had vanished, yet as though
in perverse ratio surface visibility had sharpened, as
though the light which the rain of the afternoon had
washed out of the air had gathered upon the water as
the rain itself had done, so that the yellow flood spread
on before him now with a quality almost phosphorescent,
right up to the instant where vision ceased. The darkness
in fact had its advantages; he could now stop seeing the
rain. He and his garments had been wet for more than

112 WILLIAM FAULKNER

twenty-four hours now so he had long since stopped
feeling it, and now that he could no longer see it either
it had In a certain sense ceased for him. Also, he now
had to make no effort even not to see the swell of his
passenger’s belly. So he was paddling on, strongly and
steadily, not alarmed and not concerned but just exas-
perated because he had not yet begun to see any reflec-
tion on the clouds which would indicate the city or cities
which he believed he was approaching but which were
actually now miles behind him, when he heard a sound.
He did not know what it was because he had never heard
it before and he would never be expected to hear such
again since it is not given to every man to hear such at
all and to none to hear it more than once in his life.
And he was not alarmed now either because there was
not time, for although the visibility ahead, for all its
clarity, did not extend very far, yet in the next instant
to the hearing he was also seeing something such as he
had never seen before. This was that the sharp line where
the phosphorescent water met the darkness was now
about ten feet higher than it had been an instant before
and that it was curled forward upon itself like a sheet
of dough being rolled out for a pudding. It reared, stoop-
ing; the crest of it swirled like the mane of a galloping
horse and, phosphorescent too, fretted and flickered like
fire. And while the woman huddled in the bows, aware or
not aware the convict did not know which, he (the con-
vict), his swollen and blood-streaked face gaped in an
expression of aghast and incredulous amazement, con-
tinued to paddle directly into it Again he simply had
not had time to order his rhythm-hypnotised muscles to
cease. He continued to paddle though the skiff had ceased
to move forward at all but seemed to be hanging in
space while the paddle still reached thrust recovered and

Old Mm 1 13

reached again; now instead of space the skiff became
abruptly surrounded by a welter of fleeing debris — planks,
small buildings, the bodies of drowned yet antic animals,
entire trees leaping and diving like porpoises above which
the skiff seemed to hover in weightless and airy indecision
like a bird above a fleeing countryside, undecided where
to light or whether to light at all, while the convict squatted
in it still going through the motions of paddling, wait-
ing for an opportunity to scream. He never found it For
an instant the skiff seemed to stand erect on its stem
and then shoot scrabbling and scrambling up the curling
wall of water like a cat, and soared on above the licking
crest itself and hung cradled into the high actual air in
the limbs of a tree, from which bower of new-leafed
boughs and branches the convict, like a bird in its nest
and still waiting his chance to scream and still going
through the motions of paddling though he no longer
even had the paddle now, looked down upon a world
turned to furious motion and in incredible retrograde.

Some time about midnight, accompanied by a rolling
cannonade of thunder and lightning like a battery going
into action, as though some forty hours* constipation of
the elements, the firmament itself, were discharging in
clapping and glaring salute to the ultimate acquiescence
to desperate and furious motion, and still leading its charg-
ing welter of dead cows and mules and outhouses and
cabins and hen-coops, the skiff passed Vicksburg. The
convict didn't know it He wasn’t looking high enough
above the water; he still squatted, clutching the gun*
wales and glaring at the yellow turmoil about him out
of which entire trees, the sharp gables of houses, the
long mournful heads of mules which he fended off with
a splintered length of plank snatched from he knew not

1 14 WILLIAM FAULKNER

where in passing (and which seemed to glare reproach-
fully back at him with sightless eyes, in limber-lipped
and incredulous amazement) rolled up and then down
again, the skiff now travelling toward now sideways now
sternward, sometimes in the water, sometimes riding for
yards upon the roofs of houses and trees and even upon
the backs of the mules as though even in death they
were not to escape that burden-bearing doom with which
their eunuch race was cursed. But he didn’t see Vicks-
burg; the skiff, travelling at express speed, was in a seeth-
ing gut between soaring and dizzy banks with a glare of
light above them but he did not see it; he saw the flotsam
ahead of him divide violently and begin to climb upon
itself, mounting, and he was sucked through the resulting
gap too fast to recognise it as the trestling of a railroad
bridge; for a horrible moment the skiff seemed to hang
In static indecision before the looming flank of a steam-
boat as though undecided whether to climb over it or dive
under it, then a hard icy wind tilled with the smdl and
taste and sense of wet and boundless desolation blew upon
him; the skiff made one long bounding lunge as the con-
vict’s native state, in a final paroxysm, regurgitated him
onto the wild bosom of the Father of Waters.

This is how he told about it seven weeks later, sitting
In new bed-ticking garments, shaved and with his hair
cut again, on his bunk in the barracks:

During the next three or four hours after the thunder
and lightning had spent itself the skiff ran in pitch
streaming darkness upon a roiling expanse which, even
if he could have seen, apparently had no boundaries*
Wild and invisible, it tossed and heaved about and be-
neath the boat, ridged with dirty phosphorescent foam
and filled with a debris of destruction — objects nameless
and enormous and invisible which struck and slashed at

Old Man ixy

the skiff and whirled on. He did not know he was now
upon the River. At that time he would have refused to
believe it, even if he had known. Yesterday he had known
he was in a channel by the regularity of the spacing bo*
tween the bordering trees. Now, since even by daylight
he could have seen no boundaries, the last place under
the sun (or the streaming sky rather) he would have
suspected himself to be would have been a river; if he
had pondered at all about his present whereabouts, about
the geography beneath him, he would merely have taken
himself to be travelling at dizzy and inexplicable speed
above the largest cottonfield in the world; if he who
yesterday had known he was in a river, had accepted that
fact in good faith and earnest, then had seen that river
turn without warning and rush back upon him with furious
and deadly Intent like a frenzied stallion in a lane — if ho
had suspected for one second that the wild and limitless
expanse on which he now found himself was a river, con-
sciousness would simply have refused; he would havo
fainted.

When daylight — a gray and ragged dawn filled with
driving scud between icy rain-squalls — came and he could
see again, he knew he was m no cottonfield. He knew
that tho wild water on which the skiff tossed and fled
flowed above no soil tamely trod by man, behind tho
straining and surging buttocks of a mule. That was when
it occurred to him that its present condition was no
phenomenon of a decade, but that the intervening years
during which it consented to bear upon its placid and
sleepy bosom the frail mechanicals of man’s clumsy
contriving was the phenomenon and this the norm and
the river was now doing what it liked to do, had waited
patiently the ten years in order to do, as a mule will
work for you ten years for the privilege of kicking you

II<5 WILLIAM FAULKNER

once. And he also learned something else about fear too,
something he had even failed to discover on that other
occasion when he was really afraid — that three or four
seconds of that night in his youth while he looked down
the twice-flashing pistol barrel of the terrified mail clerk
before the clerk could be persuaded that his (the con-
vict’s) pistol would not shoot: that if you just held on
long enough a time would come in fear after which it
would no longer be agony at all but merely a kind of
horrible outrageous itching, as after you have been burned
bad.

He did not have to paddle now, he just steered (who
had been without food for twenty-four hours now and
without any sleep to speak of for fifty) while the skiff
sped on across that boiling desolation where he had long
since begun to not dare believe he could possibly be
where he could not doubt he was, trying with his frag-
ment of splintered plank merely to keep the skill intact
and afloat among the houses and trees and dead animals
(the entire towns, stores, residences, parks and farm-
yards, which leaped and played about him like fish),
not trying to reach any destination, just trying to keep
the skiff afloat until he did. He wanted so little. He
wanted nothing for himself. He just wanted to get rid
of the woman, the belly, and be was trying to do that in
the right way, not for himself, but for her. He could have
put her back into another tree at any time —

“Or you could have jumped out of the boat and let
her and it drown,** the plump convict said. “Then they
could have given you the ten years for escaping and
then hung you for the murder and charged the boat to
your folks.**

“Yah,** the tall convict said. — but he had not done
that He wanted to do it the right way, find somebody.

Old Man 117

anybody he could surrender her to, something solid he
could set her down on and then jump back into the river*
if that would please anyone. That was all he wanted — *
just to come to something, anything. That didn’t seem
like a great deal to ask. And he couldn’t do it He told
how the skiff fled on —

“Didn’t you pass nobody?” the plump convict said*
“No steamboat, nothing?”

“I dont know,” the tall one said. — while he tried
merely to keep it afloat, until the darkness thinned and
lifted and revealed —

“Darkness?” the plump convict said. “I thought you
said it was already daylight”

“Yah,” the tall one said. He was rolling a cigarette,
pouring the tobacco carefully from a new sack, into the
creased paper. “This was another one* They had several
while I was gone.” — the skiff to be moving still rapidly
up a winding corridor bordered by drowned trees which
the convict recognised again to be a river running again
in the direction that, until two days ago, had been up-
stream. He was not exactly warned through instinct that
this one, like that of two days ago, was in reverse. He
would not say that he now believed himself to be in the
same river, though he would not have been surprised to
And that he did believe this, existing now, as he did and
had and apparently was to continue for an unnamed
period, in a state in which he was toy and pawn on a
vicious and inflammable geography. He merely realised
that he was in a river again, with all the subsequent
inferences of a comprehensible, even if not fa m ili ar , por-
tion of the earth’s surface* Now he believed that all he
haff to do would be to paddle far enough and he would
come to something horizontal and above water even if not
dry and perhaps even populated; and, if fast enough.

Xl8 WILLIAM FAULKNER

in time, and that his only other crying urgency was to
refrain from looking at the woman who, as vision, the
incontrovertible and apparently inescapable presence of
his passenger, returned with dawn, had ceased to be ft
human being and (you could add twenty-four more hours
to the first twenty-four and the first fifty now, even count-
ing the hen. It was dead, drowned, caught by one wing
under a shingle on a roof which had rolled momentarily
up beside the skiff yesterday and he had eaten some of it
raw though the woman would not) had become instead
one single inert monstrous sentient womb which, he
now believed, if he could only turn his gaze away and
keep it away, would disappear, and if he could only keep
his gaze from pausing again at the spot it had occupied,
would not return. That’s what he was doing this time
when he discovered the wave was coming.

He didn’t know how he discovered it was coming back.
He heard no sound, it was nothing felt nor seen. He
did not even believe that finding the skiff to be now in
alack water — that is, that the motion of the current which,
whether right or wrong, had at least been horizontal, had
now stopped that and assumed a vertical direction — was
sufficient to warn him. Perhaps it was just an invincible
and almost fanatic faith in the inventiveness and innate
viciousness of that medium on which his destiny was now
cast, apparently forever; a sudden conviction far beyond
either horror or surprise that now was none too soon for
it to prepare to do whatever it was it intended doing. So
he whirled the skiff, spun it on its heel like a running
horse, whereupon, reversed, he could not even distin-
guish the very channel he had come up. He did not know
whether he simply could not see it or if it had vanished
some time ago and he not aware at the time; whether the
river had become lost in a drowned world or if the world

Old Alan 119

had become drowned in one limitless river. So now he
could not tell if he were running directly before the wave
or quartering across its line of charge; all he could do was
keep that sense of swiftly accumulating ferocity behind
him and paddle as fast as his spent and now numb
muscles could be driven* and try not to look at the woman*
to wrench his gaze from her and keep it away until he
reached something flat and above water. So, gaunt, hollow-
eyed, striving and wrenching almost physically at his eyes
as if they were two of those suction-tipped rubber arrows
shot from the toy gun of a child, his spent muscles obey-
ing not will now but that attenuation beyond mere ex-
haustion which, mesmeric, can continue easier than cease*
he once more drove the skiff full tilt into something it
could not pass and, once more hurled violently forward
onto his hands and knees, crouching, he glared with his
wild swollen face up at the man with the shotgun and
said in a harsh, croaking voice: “Vicksburg? Where’s
Vicksburg?”

Even when he tried to tell it, even after the seven weeks
and he safe, secure, riveted warranted and doubly guar-
anteed by the ten years they had added to his sentence
for attempted escape, something of the old hysteric in-
credulous outrage came back into his face, his voice, his
speech. He never did even get on the other boat Ho
told how he clung to a strake (it was a dirty unpainted
shanty boat with a drunken rake of tin stove pipe* it had
been moving when he struck it and apparently it had
not even (hanged course even though the three people on
it must have been watching him all the while— a second
man* barefoot and with matted hair and beard also at
the steering sweep, and then — he did not know how long
— a woman leaning in the door, in a filthy assortment
of men’s garments, watching him too with the same cold

120 WILLIAM FAULKNER

speculation) being dragged violently along, trying to state
and explain his simple (and to him at least) reasonable
desire and need; telling it, trying to tell it, he could feel
again the old unforgettable affronting like an ague fit as
he watched the abortive tobacco rain steadily and faintly
from between his shaking hands and then the paper itself
part with a thin dry snapping report:

“Bum my clothes?” the convict cried. “Bum them?**

“How in hell do you expect to escape in them bill-
boards?’* the man with the shotgun said. He (the convict)
tried to tell it, tried to explain as he had tried to explain
not to the three people on the boat alone but to the entire
circumambience— desolate water and forlorn trees and sky
■ — not for justification because he needed none and knew
that his hearers, the other convicts, required none from
him, but rather as, on the point of exhaustion, he might
have picked dreamily and incredulously at a suffocation.
He told the man with the gun how he and his partner had
been given the boat and told to pick up a man and a
woman, how he had lost his partner and failed to find the
man, and now all in the world he wanted was something
fiat to leave the woman on until he could find an officer, a
sheriff. He thought of home, the place where he had lived
almost since childhood, his friends of years whose ways he
knew and who knew his ways, the familiar fields where he
did work he had learned to do well and to like, the mules
with characters he knew and respected as he knew and re-
spected the characters of certain men; he thought of the
barracks at night, with screens against the bugs in summer
and good stoves in winter and someone to supply the fuel
and the food too; the Sunday ball games and the picture
shows — things which, with the exception of the ball games,
he had never known before. But most of all, his own char-
acter (Two years ago they had offered to make a trusty of

Old Man in

him. He would no longer need to plow or feed stock, he
would only follow those who did with a loaded gun, but he
declined. “I reckon FD stick to plowing," he said, abso-
lutely without humor. “I done already tried to use a gun
one time too many.”), his good name, his responsibility not
only toward those who were responsible toward hhfi but to
tiinwif, big own honor In the doing of what waa asked of
him, hi* pride in being able to do it, no matter what it was.
He thought of this and listened to the man with the gun
talking about escape and it seemed to him that, hanging
there, being dragged violently along (It was here he said
that he first noticed the goats’ beards of moss in the trees,
though it could have been there far several days so far as
he knew. It just happened that he first noticed it here.),
he would simply burst.

"Cant you get it into your head that the last thing I
want to do is run away7" he cried. "You can set there with
that gun and watch me; I give yon fair lief. AH I want is
to pnt this woman — "

"And I told yon die could come aboard,” the man with
die gun said in his level voice. "But there aint no room on
no boat of mine for nobody banting a sheriff in no kind
of clothes, let alone a penitentiary suit.”

“When he steps aboard, knock him in the head with the
gtm band,” the man at the sweep said. “He’s drank.”

“He aint coming aboard,” the man with die gun said.
“He’s crazy.”

Then the woman spoke. She didn’t move, leaning in tho
door, in a pair of faded and patched and filthy overalls
like the two men: “Give them some grub and tell them to
get out of here.” She moved, she crossed die deck and
looked down at die convict’s companion with her cold
Sullen face. “How much more time have you got?”

“It wasn’t due till next month,” the woman in the boat

122 WILLIAM FAULKNER

said. "But I — M The woman in overalls turned to the man
with the gum

"Give them some grub," she said. But the man with die
gun was still looking down at the woman in the boat

"Come on," he said to the convict "Put her aboard,
and beat it"

“And what’ll happen to you," the woman in overalls
said, “when you try to turn her over to an officer? When
you lay alongside a sheriff and the sheriff asks you who
you are?** Still the man with the gun didn’t even look at
her. He hardly even shifted the gun across his arm as he
struck the woman across the face with the back of his
other hand, hard. “You son of a bitch," she said. Still the
man with the gun did not even look at her.

"Well?" he said to the convict

"Dont you see I cant?” the convict cried. "Cant you
see that?"

Now, he said, he gave up. He was doomed. That is, he
knew now that he had been doomed from the very start
never to get rid of her, just as the ones who sent him out
with the skiff knew that he never would actually give up;
when he recognised one of the objects which the woman
hi overalls was hurling into the skiff to be a can of con*
densed milk, he believed it to be a presage, gratuitous and
Irrevocable as a death-notice over the telegraph, that he
was not even to find a fiat stationary surface in time for
the child to be bora on it. So he told how he held the skiff
alongside the shanty-boat while the first tentative toying of
the second wave made up beneath him, while the woman
in overalls passed back and forth between house and rail,
flinging the food — the hunk of salt meat, the ragged and
filthy quilt, the scorched lumps of cold bread which she
poured Into the skiff from a heaped dishpan like so much
garbage-while he clung to the strake against the mount*

Old Man 123

mg pull of the current, the new wave which far the moment
he had forgotten because he was still trying to state die
incredible simplicity of his desire and need until die man
with die gun (the only one of the three who wore shoes)
began to stamp at his hands, he matching his hands away
one at a time to avoid the heavy shoes, then grasping the
rail again until the man with die gun kicked at his face,
he flinging himself sideways to avoid the shoe and so
breaking his hold on die rad, his weight canting the stiff
off at a tangent on the increasing current so that it began
to leave die shanty boat behind and he paddling again now,
violently, as a man harries toward the precipice for which
he knows at last he is doomed, looting back at the other
boat, the three faces sullen derisive and grim and rapidly
diminishing across the widening water and at last, apo-
plectic, suffocating with the intolerable fact not that he had
been refused but that he had been refused so little, had
wanted so little, asked for so little, yet there had been
demanded of him in return the one price out of all breath
which (they must have known) if he could have paid it, he
would not have been where he was, mating what he asked,
raising the paddle and shaking it and screaming curses
back at them even after the shotgun flashed and the charge
went scuttering past along the water to oneside.

So he hung there, he said, shaking the paddle and howl-
ing, when suddenly he remembered that other wave, the
second wall of water full of bouses and dead mules build-
ing up b ehind him bade in the swamp. So he quit yelling
then and went back to paddling. Ho was not trying to
o utrun it He just knew from exp erie nce that when it over-
took him, be would have to travel in the same direction it
was moving in anyway, whether he wanted to or not, and
when it did overtake him, he would begin to move too
fast to stop, no matter what places he might come to where

124 WILLIAM FAULKNER

be could leave the woman, land her in time. Time: that
was his itch now, so his only chance was to stay ahead
of it as long as be could and hope to reach something be-
fore it struck. So he went on, driving the skiff with muscles
which had been too tired so long they had quit feeling H,
as when a man has had bad hick for so long that he ceases
to believe it is even bad, let alone luck. Even when be ate
—the scorched lumps the size of baseballs and die weight
and durability of cannel coal even after having lain in the
skiff’s bUge where the shanty boat woman had thrown
them — the iron-like lead-heavy objects which no man
would have called bread outside of the crusted and
scorched pan in which they had cooked — it was with one
hand, begrudging even that from the paddle.

He tried to tell that too — that day while the skiff fled
on among die bearded trees while every now and then
small quiet tentative exploratory feelers would come up
from the wave behind and toy far a moment at the skiff,
fight and curious, then go on with a faint hissing sighing,
almost a chuckling, sound, the skiff going on, driving on
with nothing to see but trees and water and solitude: until
after a while it no longer seemed to Mm that he was try-
ing to put space and distance behind him or shorten space
and distance ahead but that both ho and the wave were now
hanging suspended simultaneous and u npr og ress ing in pure
time, upon a dreamy desola t ion in which he paddled on not
from any hope even to reach anything at all but merely to
keep intact what little of distance the length of dm skiff
provided between and the inert and inescapable

mass of female meat before him; then night and the skiff
zushing on, fast since any speed over anything unknown
and invisible is too fast, with nothing before him and behind
him the outrageous idea of a volume of moving water top-

Old Man 125

pling forward, its crest frothed and shredded Eke fangs,
and then dawn again (another of those dreamliko alterations
day to dark then back to day again with that quality trun-
cated, anachronic and unreal as the waxing and waning of
lights ha a theatre scene) and the skiff emerging now with
the woman no longer supine beneath the shrunken soaked
private’s coat but sitting bolt upright, gripping the gunwales
with both hands, her eyes closed and her lower lip caught
between her teeth and he driving the splintered board furi-
ously now, glaring at her out of his wild swollen sleepless
face and crying, croaking, “Hold on! For God’s sake hold
onP

*Tm trying to,” she said. “But hurryl Hurry!” He told
it, the unbeEevable: hurry, hasten: the man faffing from a
cliff being told to catch onto something and save himself;
the very telling of it emerging shadowy and burlesque, lu-
dicrous, comic and mad, from the ague of unbearable for-
getting with a quality more dreamily furious than any fable
behind proscenium lights:

He was in a basin now— “A basin?” the plump convict
said. “That's what you wash in.”

“All right,” the tall one said, harshly, above his hands. “I
did.” With a supreme effort he stilled them long enough to
release the two bits of cigarette paper and watched them
waft in light fluttering indecision to the floor between his
feet, holding his hands motionless even for a moment longer
— a basin, a broad peaceful yellow sea which had an
abruptly and curiously ordered air, giving him, Oven at that
moment, the impression that it was accustomed to water
even if not total submersion; he even remembered the name
of it, told to him two or three weeks later by someone:
Atchafalaya —

“Louisiana?” the plnmp convict said. “You mean you

126 WILLIAM FAULKNER

were clean oat of Mississippi? Hell fire.” He stared at the
tall one. “Shucks,” he said. “That aint but just across from
Vicksburg.”

“They never named any Vicksburg across from where I
was,” the tall one said. “It was Baton Rouge they named.”
And now he began to talk about a town, a little neat white
portrait town nestling among enormous very green trees,
appearing suddenly in the telling as it probably appeared
in actuality, abrupt and airy and miragelike and incredibly
serene before him behind a scattering of boats moored to
a line of freight cars standing flush to the doors in water.
And now he tried to tell that too: how he stood waist-deep
in water for a moment looking back and down at the skiff
in which the woman half lay, her eyes still closed, her
knuckles white on the gunwales and a tiny thread of blood
creeping down her chin from her chewed lip, and he look-
ing down at her in a kind of furious desperation.

“How far will I have to walk?” she said.

“I dont know, I tell you!” he cried. “But it’s land some-
where yonder! It’s land, houses.”

“If I try to move, it wont even be bom inside a boat,” die
said. “You’ll have to get closer.”

“Yes,” he cried, wild, desperate, incredulous. “Wait. Ill
go and surrender, then they will have—” He didn’t finish,
wait to finish; he told that too: himself splashing, stumbling,
trying to run, sobbing and gasping; now he saw it— another
loading platform standing above the yellow flood, the khaki
figures on it as before, identical, the same; he said how the
intervening days since that first innocent morning tele-
scoped, vanished as if they had never been, the two con-
tiguous succeedinginstants (succeeding? simultaneous) and
he transported across no intervening space but merely
turned in his own footsteps, plunging, splashing, his arms
raised, croaking harshly. He heard the startled shout.

Old Man 117

"There’s one of them!”, the command, the dash of equip-
ment, the alarmed cry: "There he goes! There he goes!”

"Yes!” he cried, running, plunging. “Here I ami Here!
Here!” running on, into the first scattered volley, stopping
among the bullets, waving his arms, shrieking, “I want to
surrender! I want to surrender!" watching not in terror but
in amazed and absolutely unbearable outrage as a squatting
clump of the khaki figures parted and he saw the machine
gun, the blunt thick muzzle slant and drop and probe to-
ward him and he still screaming in his hoarse crow’s voice,
"I want to surrender! Cant you hear me?” continuing to
scream even as he whirled and plunged splashing, ducking;
went completely under and heard the bullets going thuck-
thuck-thuck on the water above him and he scrabbling still
on the bottom, still trying to scream even before he regained
his feet and still all submerged save Ms plunging unmis-
takable buttocks, the outraged screaming bubbling from
his mouth and about his face since he merely wanted to
surrender. Then he was comparatively screened, out of
range, though not for long. That is (he didn't tell how nor
where) there was a moment in wMch he paused, breathed
for a second before running again, the course bade to the
skiff open for the time being though ire could still hear the
shouts behind him and now and then a shot, and he pant-
ing, sobbing, a long savage tear in the flesh of one hand,
got when and how he did not know, and he wasting
precious breath, speaking to no one now any more than
the scream of the dying rabbit is addressed to any mortal
ear but rather an indictment of all breath and its folly and
mffc rfng , its infinite capacity for folly and pain, which
«Min« to be its only immortality: "All in the world I want
is just to surren der.”

He returned to the stiff and got in and took up his
splintered plank. And now when he told this, despite the

tlB WILLIAM FAULKNER

foxy of element which climaxed it, it (the telling) became
quite simple; he now even creased another cigarette paper
between fingers which did not tremble at all and Altai die
paper from the tobacco sack without spiffing a aa*, as
though he had passed from the machine-gun's b arr a ge into
a bourne beyond any more amazement: so that fixe subse-
quent part of his narrative seemed to reach his listeners as
though from beyond a sheet of slightly milky though still
transparent glass, as something not heard but seen-— a
series of shadows, edgeless yet distinct, and smoothly flow-
ing, logical and unfrantic and making no sound: They were
in the skiff, in the center of the broad placid trough which
had no boundaries and down which the tiny forlorn skiff
flew to the irresistible coercion of a current going once
more he knew not where, the neat small liveoak-bowered
towns unattainable and miragelike and apparently attached
to nothing upon the airy and un changing horizon. He did
not believe them, they did not matter, he was doomed;
they were less than the figments of smoke or of d elirium,
and he driving his unceasing paddle without destination
or even hope now, looking now and then at the woman
sitting with her knees drawn up and locked and her entire
body one terrific clench while the threads of bloody saliva
crept from her teeth-denched lower lip. He was going
nowhere and fleeing from nothing, he merely c ontinue d
to paddle because he had paddled so long now that he
believed If he stopped his muscles would scream In agony.
So when it happened he was not surprised. He heard the
sound which he knew well (he had heard it but once be-
fore, true enough, but no man needed hear it but once)
and he had been expecting it; he looked back; still driving
the paddle, and saw it, aided, crested with its strawlike
flotsam of trees and debris and dead beasts, and be glared
over his shoulder at it for a full minute out of that attenu-

Old Man 129

ation far beyond the point of outragement where even
suffering, the capability of being further affronted, had
ceased, from which he now contemplated with savage and
invulnerable curiosity the further extent to which his now
anesthetised nerves could bear, what next could be in-
vented for them to bear, until the wave actually began to
rear above his head into its thunderous climax. Then only
did he turn his head. His stroke did not falter, it neither
slowed nor increased; still paddling with that spent hypnotic
steadiness, he saw the swimming deer. He did not know
what it was nor that he had altered the skiffs course to
follow it, he just watched the swimming head before him
as the wave boiled down and the skiff rose bodily in the
old familiar fashion on a welter of tossing trees and houses
and bridges and fences, he still paddling even while the
paddle found no purchase save air and still paddled even
as he and the deer shot forward side by side at arm's
length, he watching the deer now, watching the deer begin
to rise out of the water bodily until it was actually running
along upon the surface, rising still, soaring clear of the
water altogether, vanishing upward in a dying crescendo
of splashings and snapping branches, its damp scut flash-
ing upward, the entire animal vanishing upward as smoke
vanishes. And now the skiff struck and canted and he was
out of it too, standing knee-deep, springing out and falling
to his knees, scrambling up, glaring after the vanished
deer. “Land!’* he croaked. “Land! Hold on! Just hold onJ M
He caught the woman beneath the arms, dragging her out
of the boat, plunging and panting after the vanished deer.
Now earth actually appeared — an acclivity smooth and
swift and steep, bizarre, solid and unbelievable; an Indian
mound, and he plunging at the muddy slope, slipping back,
the woman struggling in his muddy hands.

“Let me down!” she cried. “Let me down!” But he held

130 WILLIAM FAULKNER

her, panting, sobbing, and rushed again at the muddy
slope; he had almost reached the flat crest with his now
violently unmanageable burden when a stick under his
foot gathered itself with thick convulsive speed. It was a
snake , he thought as his feet fled beneath him and with
the indubitable last of his strength he half pushed and half
flung the woman up the bank as he shot feet first and face
down back into that medium upon which he had lived for
more days and nights than he could remember and from
which he himself had never completely emerged, as if his
own failed and spent flesh were attempting to carry out
his furious unflagging will for severance at any price, even
that of drowning, from the burden with which, unwitting
and without choice, he had been doomed. Later it seemed
to him that he had carried back beneath the surface with
him the sound of the infant s first mewling cry.

When the woman asked him if he had a knife, stand-
ing there in the sh earning bed- ticking garments which
had got him shot at, the second time by a machine gun, on
the two occasions when he had seen any human life after
leaving the levee four days ago, the convict felt exactly as
he had in the fleeing skiff when the woman suggested that
they had better hurry. He felt the same outrageous af-
fronting of a condition purely moral, the same raging im-
potence to find any answer to it; so that, standing above
her, spent suffocating and inarticulate, it was a full minute
before he comprehended that she w as now crying, “The
can! The can in the boat!” He did not anticipate w'hat
she could want with it; he did not even wonder nor stop
to ask. He turned running; this time he thought. It's an -
other moccasin as the thick body truncated in that awk-
ward reflex which had nothing of alarm in it but only

Old Man 13 *

alertness, he not even shifting his stride though he knew
his running foot would fall within a yard of the flat head.
The bow of the skiff was well up the slope now where
the wave had set it and there was another snake just
crawling over the stem into it and as he stooped for the
bailing can he saw something else swimming toward the
mound, he didn’t know what — a head, a face at the apex
of a vee of ripples. He snatched up the can; by pure juxta-
position of it and water he scooped it full, already turning.
He saw the deer again, or another one. That is, he saw a
deer — a side glance, the light smoke-colored phantom in
a cypress vista then gone, vanished, he not pausing to look
after it, galloping back to the woman and kneeling with
the can to her lips until she told him better.

It had contained a pint of beans or tomatoes, some-
thing, hermetically sealed and opened by four blows of an
axe heel, the metal flap turned back, the jagged edges
razor-sharp. She told him how, and he used this in lieu
of a knife, he removed one of his shoelaces and cut it in two
with the sharp tin. Then she wanted warm water — “If I
just had a little hot water,” she said in a weak serene voice
without particular hope; only when he thought of matches
it was again a good deal like when she had asked him if
he had a knife, until she fumbled in the pocket of the
shrunken tunic (it had a darker double vee on one cuff and
a darker blotch on the shoulder where service stripes and
a divisional emblem had been ripped off but this meant
nothing to him) and produced a match-box contrived by
telescoping two shotgun shells. So he drew her back a little
from the water and went to hunt wood dry enough to burn,
thinking this time, lfs just another snake, only, he said,
he should have thought ten thousand other snakes: and
now he knew it was not the same deer because he saw
three at one time, does or bucks he did not know which

132 WILLIAM FAULKNER

since they were all antlerless in May and besides he had
never seen one of any kind anywhere before except on a
Christmas card; and then the rabbit, drowned, dead any-
way, already tom open, the bird, the hawk, standing upon
it — the erected crest, the hard vicious patrician nose, the
intolerant omnivorous yellow eye — and he kicking at it,
kicking it lurching and broadwinged into the actual air.

When he returned with the wood and the dead rabbit,
the baby, wrapped in the tunic, lay wedged between two
cypress-knees and the woman was not in sight, though
while the convict knelt in the mud, blowing and nursing
his meagre flame, she came slowly and weakly from the
direction of the water. Then, the water heated at last and
there produced from some where he was never to know,
she herself perhaps never to know until the need comes,
no woman perhaps ever to know, only no woman will
even wonder, that square of something somewhere between
sackcloth and silk — squatting, his own wet garments
steaming in the fire’s heat, he watched her bathe the child
with a savage curiosity and interest that became amazed
unbelief, so that at last he stood above them both, looking
down at the tiny terra-cotta-colored creature resembling
nothing, and thought, And this is all . This is what severed
me violently from all l ever knew and did not wish to
leave and cast me upon a medium I was bom to fear , to
fetch up at last in a place I never saw before and where /
do not even know where I anu

Then he returned to the water and refilled the bailing
can. It was drawing toward sunset now (or what would
have been sunset save for the high prevailing overcast) of
this day whose beginning he could not even remember;
when he returned to where the fire burned in the interlaced
gloom of the cypresses, even after this short absence, eve-
ning had definitely come, as though darkness too had taken

Old Man 133

refuge upon that quarter-acre mound, that earthen Ark out
of Genesis, that dim wet cypress-choked life-teeming con-
stricted desolation in what direction and how far from
what and where he had no more idea than of the day of
the month, and had now with the setting of the sun crept
forth again to spread upon the waters. He stewed the
rabbit in sections while the fire burned redder and redder
in die darkness where the shy wild eyes of small animals
—once the tall mild almost plate-sized stare of one of the
deer — glowed and vanished and glowed again, the broth
hot and rank after the four days; he seemed to hear the
roar of his own saliva as he watched the woman sip the
first canfuL Then he drank too; they ate the other frag-
ments which had been charring and scorching on willow
twigs; it was full night now. “You and him better deep
in the boat,” the convict said. “We want to get an early
start .tomorrow.” He shoved the bow of the skiff off the
land so it would ho level, he lengthened the painter with
a piece of grapevine and returned to the fire and tied the
grapevine about his wrist and lay down. It was mud he lay
upon, but it was solid underneath, it was earth, it did not
move; if you fell upon it you broke your bones against its
incontrovertible passivity sometimes but it did not accept
you substanceless and enveloping and suffocating, down
and down and down; it was hard at times to drive a plow
through, it sent you spent, weary, and cursing its light*
long insatiable demands back to your bunk at sunset at
times but it did not snatch you violently out of all familiar
knowing and sweep you thrall and impotent for days
against any returning. I dont know where / am and I dent
reckon I know the way back to where 1 want to go, ho
thought But at least the boat has stopped long enough to
give me, a chance to turn it around.

He waked at dawn, the light faint, the sky jonquil-

IJ4 WILLIAM FAULKNER

colored; the day would be fine. The fire had burned out;
on the opposite side of the cold ashes lay three snakes
motionless and parallel as underscoring, and in the swiftly
making light others seemed to materialise: earth which an
instant before had been mere earth broke up into motion-
less colls and loops, brandies which a moment before had
been mere branches now become immobile ophidian fes-
toons even as the convict stood thinking about food, about
something hot before they started. But he decided against
this, against wasting this much time, since there still re-
mained in the skiff quite a few of the rocklike objects
which the shanty woman had flung into it; besides (think-
ing this) , no matter how fast nor successfully he hunted, he
would never be able to lay up enough food to get them
back to where they wanted to go. So he returned to the
skiff, paying himself back to it by his vine-spliced painter,
back to the water on which a low mist thick as cotton
batting (though apparently not very tall, deep) lay, into
which the stem of the skiff was already beginning to dis-
appear although it lay with its prow almost touching the
mound. The woman waked, stirred. “We fixing to start
now?” she said.

“Yah,” the convict said. “You aint aiming to have an-
other one this morning, are you?” He got in and shoved
the skiff clear of the land, which immediately began to
dissolve into the mist “Hand me the oar,” he said over
Ins shoulder, not turning yet.

“The oar?”

He tamed his head. “The oar. You’re laying on it” But
she was not, and for an instant during which the mound,
the island continued to fade slowly into the mist which
seemed to enclose the skiff in weightless and impalpable
wool like a precious or fragile bauble or jewel, the convict
squatted not in dismay but in that frantic ami astonished

Old Man 135

outrage of a man who, having just escaped a falling safe,
is struck by the following two-ounce paper weight which
was sitting on it: this the more unbearable because he
knew that never in his life had he less time to give way
to it. He did not hesitate. Grasping the grapevine end he
sprang into the water, vanishing in the violent action of
climbing, and reappeared still climbing and (who had
never learned to swim) plunged and threshed on toward
the almost-vanished mound, moving through the water
then upon it as the deer had done yesterday and scrabbled
up the muddy slope and lay gasping and panting, still
clutching the grapevine end.

Now the first thing he did was to choose what he be-
lieved to be the most suitable tree (for an instant in which
he knew he was insane he thought of trying to saw it down
with the flange of the bailing can) and build a fire against
the butt of it. Then he went to seek food. He spent the
next six days seeking it while the tree burned through and
fell and burned through again at the proper length and he
nursing little constant cunning flames along the flanks of
the log to make it paddle-shaped, nursing them at night
too while the woman and baby (it was eating, nursing now,
he turning his back or even returning into the woods each
time she prepared to open the faded tunic) slept in the
skiff. He learned to watch for stooping hawks and so found
more rabbits and twice possums; they ate some drowned
fish which gave them both a rash and then a violent flux
and one snake which the woman thought was turtle and
which did them no harm, and one night it rained and he
got up and dragged brush, shaking the snakes (he no
longer thought. It cant nothing but another moccasin , he
just stepped aside for them as they, when there was time,
telescoped sullenly aside for him) out of it with the old
former feeling of personal invulnerability and built a shel-

136 WILLIAM FAULKNER

ter and the rain stopped at once and did not recommence
and the woman went back to the skiff.

Then one night — the slow tedious charring log was al-
most a paddle now— one night and he was in bed, in his
bed in the btmkhouse and it was cold, he was trying to
pull the covers up only his mule wouldn’t let him, prod-
ding and bumping heavily at him, trying to get into the
narrow bed with him and now the bed was cold too and
wet and he was trying to get out of it only the mule would
not let him, holding him by his belt in its teeth, jerking
and bumping him back into the cold wet bed and, leaning;
gave him a long swipe across the face with its cold limber
musculated tongue and he waked to no fire, no coal even
beneath where the almost-finished paddle had been char-
ring and something else prolonged and coldly limber
passed swiftly across his body where he lay in four inches
of water while the nose of the skiff alternately tugged at
the grapevine tied about his waist and bumped and shoved
him back into the water again. Then something else came
up and began to nudge at his ankle (the log, the oar, it
was) even as he groped frantically for the skiff, hearing
the swift rustling going to and fro inside the hull as the
woman began to thrash about and scream. “Ratsl” she
cried. ’It’s full of rats!”

“Lay still!” he cried. “It’s just snakes. Cant you hold
Still long enough for me to find the boat?” Then he found
It, he got Into it with the unfinished paddle; again the thick
muscular body convulsed under his foot; it did not strike;
he would not have cared, glaring astern where he could
see a little— the faint outer luminosity of the open water.
He poled toward it, thrusting aside the snake-looped
branches, the bottom of the skiff resounding faintly to
thick solid plops, the woman shrieking steadily. Then the
skiff was clear of the trees, the mound, and now he could

Old Alan 137

feel the bodies whipping about his ankles and hear the
rasp of them as they went over the gunwale. He drew the
log in and scooped it forward along the bottom of the boat
and up and out; against the pallid water he could see three
more of them in lashing convolutions before they vanished.
"Shut upr he cried. “Hush! I wish I was a snake so I
could get out too!”

When once more the pale and heatless wafer disc of the
early sun stared down at the skill (whether they were
moving or not the convict did not know) in its nimbus of
fine cotton batting, the convict was hearing again that
sound which he had heard twice before and would never
forget — that sound of deliberate and irresistible and mon-
strously disturbed water. But this time he could not tell
from what direction it came. It seemed to be everywhere,
waxing and fading; it was like a phantom behind the mist,
at one instant miles away, the next on the point of over-
whelming the skiff within the next second; suddenly, in
the instant he would believe (his whole weary body would
spring and scream) that he was about to drive die skiff
point-blank into it and with the unfinished paddle of the
color and texture of sooty bricks, like something gnawed
out of an old chimney by beavers and weighing twenty-
five pounds, he would whirl the skiff frantically and find
the sound dead ahead of him again. Then something bel-
lowed tremendously above his head, he heard human
voices, a bell jangled and the sound ceased and the mist
vanished as when you draw your hand across a frosted
pane, and the skiff now lay upon a sunny glitter of brown
water flank to flank with, and about thirty yards away
from, a steamboat. The decks were crowded and packed
with men women and children sitting or standing beside
and among a homely conglomeration of hurried furniture,
who looked mournfully and silently down into the skiff

I38 WILLIAM FAULKNER

while the convict and the man with a megaphone in the
pilot house talked to each other in alternate puny shouts
and roars above the chuffing of the reversed engines:

iC What in hell are you trying to do? Commit suicide?”

“Which is the way to Vicksburg?’'

“Vicksburg? Vicksburg? Lay alongside and come
aboard.”

“Will you take the boat too?”

“Boat? Boat?” Now the megaphone cursed, the roaring
waves of blasphemy and biological supposition empty
cavernous and bodiless in turn, as if the water, the air,
the mist had spoken it, roaring the words then taking them
back to itself and no harm done, no scar, no insult left
anywhere. “If I took aboard every floating sardine can you
sonabitchin mushrats want me to I wouldn’t even have
room forrard for a leadsman. Come aboard! Do you ex-
pect me to hang here on stem engines till hell freezes?”

“I aint coining without the boat,” the convict said. Now
another voice spoke, so calm and mild and sensible that
for a moment it sounded more foreign and out of place
than even the megaphone’s bellowing and bodiless pro-
fanity:

“Where is it you are trying to go?”

“I aint trying,” the convict said. “Fm going. Parchman.”
The man who had spoken last turned and appeared to
converse with a third man in the pilot house. Then he
looked down at the skiff again.

“Carnarvon?”

“What?” the convict said. “Parchman?”

“All right. We’re going that way. We’ll put you off
where you can get home. Come aboard.”

“The boat too?”

“Yes, yes. Come along. We’re burning coal just to talk
to you.” So the convict came alongside then and watched

Old Man 139

them help the woman and baby over the rail and he came
aboard himself, though he still held to the end of the vine-
spliced painter until the skiff was hoisted onto the boiler
deck, “My God,” the man, the gentle one, said, “is that
what you have been using for a paddle?”

“Yah,” the convict said, “I lost the plank.*

“The plank,” the mild man. (the convict told how he
seemed to whisper it), “the plank. Well. Come along and
get something to eat. Your boat is all right now.”

“X reckon I’ll wait here,” the convict said. Because now,
he told them, he began to notice for the first time that the
other people, the other refugees who crowded the deck,
who had gathered in a quiet circle about the upturned skiff
on which he and the woman sat, the grapevine painter
wrapped several times about his wrist and clutched in his
hand, staring at him and the woman with queer hot mourn-
ful intensity, were not white people —

“You mean niggers?” the plump convict said,

“No. Not Americans.”

“Not Americans? You was clean out of America even?*
“I dont know,” the tali one said. “They called it Atcha-
falaya.” — Because after a while he said, “What?” to the
man and the man did it again, gobble-gobble—
“Gobble-gobble?” the plump convict said.

“That’s the way they talked,” the tall one said. “Gob-
ble-gobble, whang, caw-caw-to-to.” — And he sat there
and watched them gobbling at one another and then
looking at him again, then they fell back and the mild
man (he wore a Red Cross brassard) entered, followed
by a waiter with a tray of food. The mild man carried two
glasses of whiskey.

“Drink this,” the mild man said. “This will warm yon*
The woman took hers and drank it but the convict told
how he looked at his and thought, / aint tasted whiskey

140 WILLIAM FAULKNER

in seven years. He had not tasted it but once before that;
it was at the still itself back in a pine hollow; he was
seventeen, he had gone there with four companions, two
of whom were grown men, one of twenty-two or -three, the
other about forty; he remembered it. That is, he remem-
bered perhaps a third of that evening — a fierce turmoil in
the hell-colored firelight, the shock and shock of blows
about his head (and likewise of his own fists on other
hard bone), then the waking to a splitting and blinding
6un in a place, a cowshed, he had never seen before and
which later turned out to be twenty miles from his home.
He said he thought of this and he looked about at the
faces watching him and he said,

“I reckon not”

“Come, come,” the mild man said. “Drink it.*

“Idontwant it.”

“Nonsense,” the mild man said. Tm a doctor. Here.
Then you can eat.” So he took the glass and even then
he hesitated but again the mild man said, “Come along,
down with it; you’re still holding us up,” in that voice
still calm and sensible but a little sharp too — the voice
of a man who could keep calm and affable because he
wasn’t used to being crossed — and he drank the whiskey
and even in the second between the sweet full fire in his
belly and when it began to happen he was trying to say, “I
tried to tell you! I tried to!” But it was too late now in the
pallid sun-glare of the tenth day of terror and hopelessness
and despair and impotence and rage and outrage and it
was himself and the mule, his mule (they had let him name
it — John Henry) which no man save he had plowed for
five years now and whose ways and habits he knew and
respected and who knew his ways and habits so well that
each of them could anticipate the other’s very movements
and intentions; it was himself and the mule, die little gob-

Old Man 141

bling faces flying before them, the familiar hard skull-bones
shocking against his fists, his voice shouting, “Come on,
John Henry! Plow them down! Gobble them down, boy!”
even as the bright hot red wave turned back, meeting it
joyously, happily, lifted, poised, then hurling through
space, triumphant and yelling, then again the old shock*
ing blow at the back of his head: he lay on the deck,
flat on his back and pinned arm and kg and cold sober
again, his nostrils gushing again, the mild man stooping
over him with behind the thin rimless glasses the coldest
eyes the convict had ever seen— eyes which the convict
said were not looking at him but at the gushing blood with
nothing in the world in them but complete impersonal
interest.

“Good man,” the mild man said. “Plenty of life in the
old carcass yet, eh? Plenty of good red blood too. Anyone
ever suggest to you that you were hemophilic?” (“What?”
the plump convict said. “Hemophilic? You know what that
means?” The tall convict had his cigarette going now, his
body jackknifed backward into the coffinlike space between
the upper and lower bunks, lean, clean, motionless, the
blue smoke wreathing across his lean dark aquiline shaven
face. “That’s a calf that’s a bull and a cow at the same
time.”

“No, it aint,” a third convict said. “It’s a calf or a colt
that aint neither one.”

“Hell fire,” the plump one said. “He’s got to be one
or the other to keep from drounding.” He had never ceased
to look at the tall one in the bunk; now he spoke to him
again: “You let him call you that?”) The tall one had done
so. He did not answer the doctor (this was where he
stopped thinking of him as the mild man) at all. He could
not move either, though he felt fine, he felt better than he
had in ten days. So they helped him to his feet and steadied

14* WILLIAM FAULKNER

Mm over and lowered him onto the upturned skiff beside
the woman, where he sat bent forward, elbows on knees in
the immemorial attitude, watching his own bright crimson
staining the mud-trodden deck, until the doctor’s clean
clipped hand appeared under his nose with a phial.

“Smell,” the doctor said. “Deep.” The convict inhaled,
the sharp ammoniac sensation burned up his nostrils and
Into his throat. “Again,” the doctor said. The convict in-
haled obediently. This time he choked and spat a gout of
blood, his nose now had no more feeling than a toenail,
other than it felt about the size of a ten-inch shovel, and
as cold.

“I ask you to excuse me,” he said. “I never meant — ”

“Why?” the doctor said. “You put up as pretty a scrap
against forty or fifty men as I ever saw. You lasted a good
two seconds. Now you can eat something. Or do you think
that will send you haywire again?”

They both ate, sitting on the skill, the gobbling faces
no longer watching them now, the convict gnawing slowly
and painfully at the thick sandwich, hunched, his face laid
sideways to the food and parallel to the earth as a dog
chews; the steamboat went on. At noon there were bowls
of hot soup and bread and more coffee; they ate this too,
sitting side by side on the skiff, the grapevine still wrapped
about the convict’s wrist. The baby waked and nursed and
slept again and they talked quietly:

“Was it Parchman he said he was going to take us?”

“That’s where I told him I wanted to go.”

“It never sounded exactly like Parchman to me. It
sounded like he said something else.” The convict had
thought that too. He had been thinking about that fairly
soberly ever since they boarded the steamboat and soberly
indeed ever since he had remarked the nature of the other
passengers, those men and women definitely a little shorter

Old Man 143

than he and with skin a little different in pigmentation from
any sunburn, even though the eyes were sometimes blue or
gray, who talked to one another in a tongue he had never
heard before and who apparently did not understand his
own, people the like of whom he had never seen about
Parchman nor anywhere else and who he did not believe
were going there or beyond there either. But after his bill*
billy country fashion and kind he would not ask, because
to his raising asking information was asking a favor and
you did not ask favors of strangers; if they offered them
perhaps you accepted and you expressed gratitude almost
tediously recapitulant, but you did not ask. So he would
watch and wait, as he had done before, and do or try to do
to the best of his ability what the best of his judgment dic-
tated.

So he waited, and in midafternoon the steamboat
chuffed and thrust through a willow-choked gorge and
emerged from it, and now the convict knew it was the
River. He could believe it now — the tremendous reach,
yellow and sleepy in the afternoon — (“Because it’s too
big,” he told them soberly. “Aint no flood in the world
big enough to make it do more than stand a little higher
so it can look back and see just where the flea is, just ex-
actly where to scratch. It’s the little ones, the little piddling
creeks that run backward one day and forward the next
and come busting down on a man full of dead mules and
hen houses.”) — and the steamboat moving up this now
{like a ant crossing a plate , the convict thought, totting
beside the woman on the upturned skiff, the baby nursing
again, apparently looking too out across the water where,
a mile away on either hand, the twin lines of levee re-
sembled parallel unbroken floating thread) and then it was
nearing sunset and he began to hear, to notice, the voices
of the doctor and of the man who had first bawled at him

144 WILLIAM FAULKNER

through the megaphone now bawling again from the pilot
house overhead:

•‘Stop? Stop? Am I miming a street car?**

•‘Stop for the novelty then,* 9 the doctor’s pleasant voice
said. “I dont know how many trips back and forth you
have made in yonder nor how many of what you call
muskrats yon have fetched oat Bat this is the first time
you ever had two people— no, three— who not only knew
the name of some place they wished to go to but were
actually trying to go there.** So the convict waited while
the sun slanted more and more and the steamboat-ant
crawled steadily on across its vacant and gigantic plate
turning more and more to copper. But he did not ask, he
just waited. Maybe it was Carrollton he sold, bo thought.
It begun with a C. But he did not believe that either. He
did not know where he was, but he did know that this was
not anywhere near the Carrollton he remembered from that
day seven years ago when, shackled wrist to wrist with the
deputy sheriff, he had passed through it on the train — the
slow spaced repeated shattering banging of trucks where
two railroads crossed, a random scattering of white houses
tranquil among trees on green hills lush with summer, a
pointing spire, the finger of the hand of God. But there
was no river there. And you cant never close to this river
Without knowing it, he thought / dont care who you are
nor where you have been all your life. Then the head of
the steamboat began to swing across the stream, its shadow
swinging too, travelling long before it across the water,
toward the vacant ridge of willow-massed earth empty of
all life. There was nothing there at all, die convict could
not even see either earth or water beyond it; it was as
though the steamboat were about to crash slowly through
the thin low frail willow barrier and embark into space, or
lacking this, slow and back and fill and disembark him into

Old Man 145

space, granted it was about to disembark him, granted this
was (hat place which was not near Parchman and was not
Carrollton either, even though it did begin with C. Then he
turned his head and saw die doctor stooping over the
woman, pushing the baby’s eyelid up with his forefinger,
peering at it

“Who else was there when he came?” the doctor said*

••Nobody,” the convict said*

“Did it all yourselves, eh?”

“Yes,” the convict said* Now the doctor stood up and
looked at the convict.

“This is Carnarvon,” he said.

“Carnarvon?” the convict said. “That aint — ” Then he
stopped, ceased. And now he told about that — the intent
eyes as dispassionate as ice behind the rimless glasses, the
clipped quick-tempered face that was not accustomed to
being crossed or lied to either* (“Yes,” the plump convict
said. “That’s what I was aiming to ask. Them clothes. Any-
body would know them* How if this doctor was as smart
as you claim he was — ”

“I had slept in them for ten nights, mostly in the mud,”
the tall one said. “I had been rowing since midnight with
that sapling oar I had tried to bum out that I never had
time to scrape the soot off. But it’s being scared and wor-
ried and then scared and then worried again in clothes for
days and days and days that changes the way they look. I
dent mean just your pants.” He did not laugh. “Your face
too. That doctor knowed*”

“AH right," the plump one said. “Go on.”)

“I know it,” the doctor said. “I discovered that white
you were lying on the deck yonder sobering up again.
Now dont lie to me. I dont like lying. This boat is going to
New Orleans.”

“No,” the convict said immediately, quietly, with abso-

I4<S WILLIAM FAULKNER

late finality. He could hear them again — the thuck-thuck-
thuck on the water where an instant before he had been.
Bat he was not thinking of the bullets. He had forgotten
them* forgiven them. He was thinking of himself crouch*
ing, sobbing, panting before running again — the voice, the
indictment, the cry of final and irrevocable repudiation of
the old primal faithless Manipulator of all the lust and
folly and injustice: All in the world I wanted was just to
surrender; thinking of it, remembering it but without heat
now, without passion now and briefer than an epitaph:
No. I tried that once . They shot at me ,

“So you dont want to go to New Orleans. And you
didn’t exactly plan to go to Carnarvon. But you will take
Carnarvon in preference to New Orleans.” The convict
said nothing. The doctor looked at him, the magnified
pupils like the heads of two bridge nails. “What were you
in for? Hit him harder than you thought, eh?”

“No. I tried to rob a train.”

“Say that again.” The convict said it again. “Well? Go
on. You dont say that in the year 1927 and just stop, man.”
So the convict told it, dispassionately too— about the maga-
zines, the pistol which would not shoot, the mask and
the dark lantern in which no draft had been arranged to
keep the candle burning so that it died almost with the
match but even then left the metal too hot to carry, won
with subscriptions. Only it cant my eyes or my mouth either
Ms watching, he thought Ifs like he is watching the way
my hair grows on my head . if l see,” the doctor said. “But
something went wrong. But youVe had plenty of time to
think about it since. To decide what was wrong; what you
failed to do.”

“Yes,” the convict said. “I’ve thought about It a right
smart since.”

Old Man 147

•So next time you are not going to make that mistake."

"I dont know,” the convict said. “There aint going to
be a next time."

"Why? If you know what you did wrong, they wont
catch you next time."

The convict looked at the doctor steadily. They looked
at each other steadily; the two sets of eyes were not so
different after alL “I reckon I see what you mean," the
convict said presently. “I was eighteen then. I’m twenty-
five now."

"Oh," the doctor said. Now (the convict tried to tell
it) the doctor did not move, he just simply quit looking
at the convict He produced a pack of cheap cigarettes
from his coat “Smoke?” he said.

"I wouldn’t care for none," the convict said.

"Quite," the doctor said In that affable clipped voice.
He put the cigarettes away. "There has been conferred
upon my race (the Medical race) also the power to bind
and to loose, if not by Jehovah perhaps, certainly by the
American Medical Association — on which incidentally, in
this day of Our Lord, I would put my money, at any odds,
at any amount, at any time. I dont know just how far out
of bounds I am on this specific occasion but I think well
put it to the touch." He cupped his hands to his mouth,
toward the pilot house overhead. “Captain!" he shouted.
"We’ll put these three passengers ashore here.” He turned
to the convict again. 4 *Yes,” he said, “I think I shall let your
native state lick its own vomit Here." Again his hand
emerged from his pocket, this time with a bill in it

"No," the convict said.

"Come, come; I dont like to be disputed either."

"No," the convict said, "I aint got any way to pay It
back."

148 WILLIAM FAULKNER

“Did I ask you to pay it back?”

“No,” the convict said, “I never asked to borrow it
cither”

So once more he stood on dry land, who had already
been toyed with twice by that risible and concentrated
power of water, once more than should have fallen to
the lot of any one man, any one lifetime, yet for whom
there was reserved still another unbelievable recapitu-
lation, he and the woman standing on the empty levee,
the sleeping child wrapped in the faded tunic and the
grapevine painter still wrapped about the convict’s wrist,
watching the steamboat back away and turn and once more
crawl onward up the platter-like reach of vacant water
burnished more and more to copper, its trailing smoke
roiling in slow copper-edged gouts, thinning out along the
water, fading, stinking away across the vast serene desola-
tion, the boat growing smaller and smaller until it did not
seem to crawl at all but to hang stationary in the airy sub-
stanceless sunset, dissolving into nothing like a pellet of
floating mud.

Then he turned and for the first time looked about him,
behind him, recoiling, not through fear but through pure
reflex and not physically but the soul, the spirit, that pro-
found sober alert attentiveness of the hillman who will not
ask anything of strangers, not even information, thinking
quietly. No. This aint Carrollton neither . Because he now
looked down the almost perpendicular landward slope of
the levee through sixty feet of absolute space, upon a sur-
face, a terrain flat as a waffle and of the color of a waffle
or perhaps of the summer coat of a claybank horse and
possessing that same piled density of a rug or peltry,
spreading away without undulation yet with that curious
appearance of imponderable solidity like fluid, broken
here and there by thick humps of arsenical green which

Old Man 149

nevertheless still seemed to possess no height and by
writhen veins of the color of ink which he began to suspect
to be actual water but with judgment reserved, with judg-
ment still reserved even when presently he was walking in
it That’s what he said, told: So they went on. He didn’t
tell how he got the skiff singlehanded up the revetment
and across the crown and down the opposite sixty-foot
drop, he just said he went on, in a swirling cloud of mos-
quitoes like hot cinders, thrusting and plunging through
the saw-edged grass which grew taller than his head and
which whipped back at his arms and face like limber
knives, dragging by the vine-spliced painter the skiff in
which the woman sat, slogging and stumbling knee-deep
in something less of earth than water, along one of those
black winding channels less of water than earth: and then
(he was in the skiff too now, paddling with the charred
log, what footing there had been having given away be-
neath him without warning thirty minutes ago, leaving only
the air-filled bubble of his jumperback ballooning lightly
on the twilit water until he rose to the surface and
scrambled into the skiff) the house, the cabin a little larger
than a horse-box, of cypress boards and an iron roof, ris-
ing on ten-foot stilts slender as spiders’ legs, like a shabby
and death-stricken (and probably poisonous) wading crea-
ture which had got that far into that flat waste and died
with nothing nowhere in reach or sight to lie down upon, a
pirogue tied to the foot of a crude ladder, a man standing
in the open door holding a lantern (it was that dark now)
above his head, gobbling down at them.

He told it — of the next eight or nine or ten days, he did
not remember which, while the four of them — himself and
the woman and baby and the little wiry man with rotting
teeth and soft wild bright eyes like a rat or a chipmunk,
whose language neither of them could understand— lived

IJO WILLIAM FAULKNER

In the room and a half. He did not tell it that way, Just as
he apparently did not consider it worth the breath to tell
how he had got the hundred-and-sixty-pound skiff single-
handed up and across and down the sixty-foot levee. He
just said, “After a while we come to a house and we stayed
there eight or nine days then they blew up the levee with
dynamite so we had to leave.’* That was all. But he remem-
bered it, but quietly now, with the cigar now, the good one
the Warden had given him (though not lighted yet) in his
peaceful and steadfast hand, remembering that first morn-
ing when he waked on the thin pallet beside his host (the
woman and baby had the one bed) with the fierce sun
already latticed through the warped rough planking of the
wall, and stood on the rickety porch looking out upon that
flat fecund waste neither earth nor water, where even the
senses doubted which was which, which rich and massy
air and which mazy and impalpable vegetation, and thought
quietly, He must do something here to eat and live. But I
dont know what. And until J can go on again, until I can
find where J am and how to pass that town without them
seeing me I will have to help him do it so we can eat and
live too, and I dont know what. And he had a change of
clothing too, almost at once on that first morning, not tell-
ing any more than he had about the skiff and the levee how
he had begged borrowed or bought from the man whom he
had not laid eyes on twelve hours ago and with whom on
the day he saw him for the last time he still could exchange
no word, the pair of dungaree pants which even the Cajan
had discarded as no longer wearable, filthy, buttonless, the
legs slashed and frayed into fringe like that on an 1890
hammock, in which he stood naked from the waist up and
holding out to her the mud-caked and soot-stained jumper
and overall when the woman waked on that first morning
in the crude bunk nailed into one comer and filled with

Old Man 151

dried grass, saying, “Wash them. Good. I want all them
stains out. All of them.”

“But the jumper,” she said. “Aint he got ere old shirt
too? That sun and them mosquitoes — ■” But he did not
even answer, and she said no more either, though when he
and the Cajan returned at dark the garments were clean,
stained a little still with the old mud and soot, but clean,
resembling again what they were supposed to resemble as
(his arms and back already a fiery red which would be
blisters by tomorrow) he spread the garments out and
examined them and then rolled them up carefully in a six-
months-old New Orleans paper and thrust the bundle be-
hind a rafter, where it remained while day followed day
and the blisters on his back broke and suppurated and he
would sit with his face expressionless as a wooden mask
beneath the sweat while the Cajan doped his back with
something on a filthy rag from a filthy saucer, she still say-
ing nothing since she too doubtless knew what his reason
was, not from that rapport of the wedded conferred upon
her by the two weeks during which they had jointly suf-
fered all the crises emotional social economic and even
moral which do not always occur even in the ordinary fifty
married years (the old married: you have seen them, the
electroplate reproductions, the thousand identical coupled
faces with only a collarless stud or a fichu out of Louisa
Alcott to denote the sex, looking in pairs like the winning
braces of dogs after a field trial, out from among the
packed columns of disaster and alarm and baseless assur-
ance and hope and incredible insensitivity and Insulation
from tomorrow propped by a thousand morning sugar
bowls or coffee urns; or singly, rocking on porches or sit-
ting jrn the sun beneath the tobacco-stained porticoes of a
thousand county courthouses, as though with the death of
the other having inherited a sort of rejuvenescence, immor-

1$Z WILLIAM FAULKNER

tality; relict, they take a new lease on breath and seem to
live forever, as though that flesh which the old ceremony
or ritual had morally purified and made legally one had
actually become so with long tedious habit and he or she
who entered the ground first took all of it with him or her,
leaving only the old permanent enduring bone, free and
tramelless) — not because of this but because she too had
stemmed at some point from the same dim hill-bred Abra-
ham.

So the bundle remained behind the rafter and day fol-
lowed day while he and his partner (he was in partnership
now with his host, hunting alligators on shares, on the
halvers he called it — “Halvers?” the plump convict said.
•'How could you make a business agreement with a man
you claim you couldn’t even talk to?”

“I never had to talk to him,” the tall one said. “Money
aint got but one language.”) departed at dawn each day,
at first together in the pirogue but later singly, the one in
the pirogue and the other in the skiff, the one with the bat-
tered and pitted rifle, the other with the knife and a piece
of knotted rope and a lightwood club the size and weight
and shape of a Thuringian mace, stalking their pleistocene
nightmares up and down the secret inky channels which
writhed the flat brass-colored land. He remembered that
too: that first morning when turning in the sunrise from the
rickety platform he saw the hide nailed drying to the wall
and stopped dead, looking at it quietly, thinking quietly
and soberly. So thafs it. Thafs what he does in order to
eat and live, knowing it was a hide, a skin, but from what
animal, by association, ratiocination or even memory of
any picture out of his dead youth, be did not know but
knowing that it was the reason, the explanation, for the
little lost spider-legged house (which had already begun to
die, to rot from the legs upward almost before the roof was

Old Mm ijj

nailed on) set in that teeming and myriad desolation, en-
closed and lost within the furious embrace of flowing mare
earth and stallion sun, divining throe ph porn r ap pratnf Vint!
for kind, hillbilly and hayoa tat, the two one and identical
became of the same grudged dispensation and niggard fate
of hard and unceasing travail not to gain future security, a
balance in the bank or even in a buried soda can for doth*
ful and easy old age, but just permission to endure and en-
dure to buy air to feel and sun to drink for each’s little
while, thinking (the convict). Well, anyway / am going to
find out what it is sooner than 1 expected to, and did so,
re-entered the house where the woman was just waking
la the one sorry built-in straw-filled bunk which the Cajaa
had surrendered to her, and ate the breakfast (die rice, a
•eml-iiqnld mess violent with pepper and mostly fish con-
siderably high, the chicory-thickened coffee) and, shirtless,
followed the little scuttling bobbing bright-eyed rotten-
toothed man down the crude ladder and into die pirogue.
He had never seen a pirogue either and he believed that it
would not remain upright — not that it was light and pre-
cariously balanced with its open side upward but that there
Was inherent in the wood, the very log, some dynamic and
Unsleeping natural law, almost wifi, which Its present posi-
tion outraged and violated — yet accepting fids too as he
had the fact that that hide had belonged to something
larger than any calf or hog and that anything which looked
like that on the outside would be more than likely to have
teeth and claws too, accepting this, squatting in fire pirogue,
clutching both gunwales, rigidly immobile as though he had
an egg filled with nitroglycerin in his mouth and scarcely
breathing, thinking. If that’s it, then I can do it too and
even if he cant tell me how I reckon I can watch him end
find out. And he did this too, he remembered it, quietly
even yet, thinking, I thought that was how to do it and l

154 WILLIAM FAULKNER

reckon I would still think that even if / had it to do again
now for the first time — the brazen day already fierce upon
bis naked back, the crooked channel like a volnted thread
of ink, the pirogue moving steadily to the paddle which
both entered and left the water without a sound; then the
sudden cessation of the paddle behind him and the fierce
hissing gobble of the Cajan at his back and he squatting
bate-breathed and with that intense immobility of com*
plete sobriety of a blind man listening while the frail
wooden shell stole on at the dying apex of its own parted
water. Afterward he remembered the rifle too — the rust-
pitted single-shot weapon with a clumsily wired stock and a
muzzle you could have driven a whiskey cork into, which
the Cajan had brought into the boat — but not now; now he
just squatted, crouched, immobile, breathing with infinites!*
mal care, his sober unceasing gaze going here and there
constantly as he thought. What? What? I not only dont
know what I am looking for, I dont even know where to
look for it. Then he felt the motion of the pirogue as the
Cajan moved and then the tense gobbling hissing actually,
hot rapid and repressed, against his neck and ear, and glanc-
ing downward saw projecting between his own arm and body
from behind, the Cajan’s hand holding the knife, and glar-
ing up again saw the flat thick spit of mud which as he
looked at It divided and became a thick mud-colored log
which in turn seemed, still immobile, to leap suddenly
against his retinae in three— no, four — dimensions: vol-
ume, solidity, shape, and another: not fear but pure and
intense speculation and he looking at the scaled motionless
shape, thinking not. It looks dangerous but It looks big,
thinking. Well, maybe a mule standing in a lot looks big to
a man that never walked up to one with a halter before ,
thinking. Only if he could just tell me what to do it would
save time , the pirogue drawing nearer now, creeping now f

Old Man 155

with no ripple now even and it seemed to him that he could
even hear his companion's held breath and he taking the
knife from the other’s hand now and not even thinking thl«
since it was too fast, a hash; it was not a surrender, not a
resignation, it was too calm, it was a part of him, he had
drunk it with liis mother’s milk and lived with it all his life:
After all a man cant only do what he has to do, with what
he has to do it with , with what he has learned, to the best
of his judgment . And I reckon a hog is still a hog, no matter
what it looks like . So here goes, sitting still for an instant
longer until the bow of the pirogue grounded lighter than
the falling of a leaf and stepped out of it and paused just
for one instant while the words It does look big stood for
just a second, unemphatic and trivial, somewhere where
some fragment of his attention could see them and van-
ished, and stooped straddling, the knife driving even as he
grasped the near foreleg, this all in the same instant when
the lashing tail struck him a terrific blow upon the back.
But the knife was home, he knew that even on his back in
the mud, the weight of the thrashing beast longwise upon
him, its ridged back clutched to his stomach, his arm about
its throat, the hissing head clamped against his jaw, the furi-
ous tail lashing and flailing, the knife in his other hand
probing for the life and finding it, the hot fierce gush: and
now sitting beside the profound up-bellied carcass, his head
again between his knees in the old attitude while his own
blood freshened the other which drenched him, thinking,
It's my durn nose again*

So he sat there, his head, his streaming face, bowed
between his knees in an attitude not of dejection but pro-
foundly bemused, contemplative, while the shrill voice of
the Cajan seemed to buzz at him from an enormous dis-
tance; after a time he even looked up at the antic wiry
figure bouncing hysterically about him, the face wild and

1 $6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

grimacing, the voice gobbling and high; while the convict,
holding his face carefully slanted so the blood would run
free, looked at him with the cold intentness of a curator or
custodian paused before one of his own glass cases, the
Cajan threw up the rifle, cried “Boom-boom-booml” flung
it down and in pantomime re-enacted the recent scene then
whirled his hands again, crying “Magnifique! Magnifique,
Cent d’argent! Mille d’argent! Tout l’argent sous le del de
Dieu!” But the convict was already looking down again,
cupping the coffee-colored water to his face, watching the
constant bright carmine marble it, thinking. It's a little
late to be telling me that now, and not even thinking this
long because presently they were in the pirogue again, the
convict squatting again with that unbreathing rigidity as
though he were trying by holding his breath to decrease
his very weight, the bloody skin in the bows before him and
he looking at it, thinking, And 1 cant even ask him how
much my half will be .

But this not for long either, because as he was to tell the
plump convict later, money has but one language. He re-
membered that too (they were at home now, the skin
spread on the platform, where for the woman’s benefit now
the Cajan once more went through the pantomime— the
gun which was not used, the hand-to-hand battle; for the
second time the invisible alligator was slain ami d cries, the
victor rose and found this time that not even the woman
was watching him. She was looking at the once more swol-
len and inflamed face of the convict, “You mean it kicked
you right in the face?” she said,

“Nah,” the convict said harshly, savagely. “It never had
to. I done seem to got to where if that boy was to shoot me
In the tail with a bean blower my nose would bleed.”) —
remembered that too but he did not try to tell it Perhaps
he could not have— how two people who could not even

Old Mem 157

talk to one another made an agreement which both not
only understood but which each knew the other would
hold true and protect (perhaps for this reason) better than
any written and witnessed contract. They even discussed
and agreed somehow that they should hunt separately, each
in his own vessel, to double the chances of finding prey.
But this was easy: the convict could almost understand the
words in which the Cajan said, “You do not need me and
the rifle; we will only hinder you, be in your way.** And
more than this, they even agreed about the second rifle:
that there was someone, it did not matter who — friend,
neighbor, perhaps one in business in that line — from whom
they could rent a second rifle; in their two patois, the one
bastard English, the other bastard French — the one vola-
tile, with his wild bright eyes and his voluble mouth full
of stumps of teeth, the other sober, almost grim, swollen-
faced and with his naked back blistered and scoriated like
so much beef — they discussed this, squatting on either side
of the pegged-out hide like two members of a corporation
facing each other across a mahogany board table, and
decided against it, the convict deciding: “I reckon not,* he
said. “I reckon if I had knowed enough to wait to start
out with a gun, I still would. But since I done- already
started out without one, I dont reckon FH change.” Be-
cause it was a question of the money in terms of time,
days. (Strange to say, that was the one thing which tho
Cajan could not tell him: how much the half would be.
But the convict knew it was half.) He had so little of them.
He would have to move on soon, thinking (the convict),
AU this dum foolishness will stop soon and I can get on
back, and then suddenly he found that he was thinking.
Will have to get on back, and he became quite still and
looked about at the rich strange desert which surrounded
him, in which he was temporarily lost in peace and hope

158 WILLIAM FAULKNER

and into which the last seven years had sunk like so many
trivial pebbles into a pool, leaving no ripple, and ho
thought quietly, with a kind of bemused amazement. Yes •
/ reckon / had done forgot how good making money was .
Being let to make it.

So he used no gun, his the knotted rope and the Thurin-
gian mace, and each morning he and the Cajan took their
separate ways in the two boats to comb and creep the
secret channels about die lost land from (or out of) which
now and then still other pint-sized dark men appeared
gobbling, abruptly and as though by magic from nowhere,
in other hollowed Jogs, to follow quietly and watch him
at his single combats — men named Tine and Toto and
Theule, who were not much larger than and looked a good
deal like the muskrats which the Cajan (the host did this
too, supplied the kitchen too, he expressed this too like
the rifle business, in his own tongue, the convict compre-
hending this too as though it had been English: “Do not
concern yourself about food, O Hercules. Catch alligators;
I will supply the pot.”) took now and then from traps as
you take a shoat pig at need from a pen, and varied the
eternal rice and fish (the convict did tell this: how at
night, in the cabin, the door and one sashless window
battened against mosquitoes — a form, a ritual, as empty
as crossing the fingers or knocking on wood — sitting be-
side the bug-swirled lantern on the plank table in a tem-
perature close to blood heat he would look down at the
swimming segment of meat on his sweating plate and
think, It must be Theuie . He was the fat one.) — day fol-
lowing day, unemphatic and identical, each like the one
before and the one which would follow while his theoretical
half of a sum to be reckoned in pennies, dollars, or tens of
dollars he did not know, mounted — the mornings when he
set forth to find waiting for him like the matador his

Old Man 159

aficionados the small dump of constant and deferential
{drogues, the hard noons when ringed half about by little
motionless shells he fought his solitary combats, the eve*
nings, the return, die {drogues departing one by one into
Inlets and passages which during the first few days he could
not even distinguish, then die platform In the twilight where
before the static woman and the usually nursing infant
and the one or two bloody hides of the day’s take the
Cajan would perform his ritualistic victorious pantomime
before the two growing rows of knife-marks in one of the
boards of the wall; then the nights when, the woman and
child in the single bunk and the Cajan already snoring on
the pallet and the reeking lantern set close, he (the con*
vict) would sit on his naked heels, sweating steadily, his
face worn and calm, immersed and indomitable, his bowed
back raw and savage as beef beneath the suppurant old
blisters and the fierce welts of tails, and scrape and chip
at the charred sapling which was almost a paddle now,
pausing now and then to raise his head while the cloud
of mosquitoes about it whined and whirled, to stare at the
wall before him until after a while the crude boards them*
selves must have dissolved away and let his blank unsee-
ing gaze go on and on unhampered, through the rich
oblivious darkness, beyond it even perhaps, even perhaps
beyond the seven wasted years during which, so he had just
realised, he had been permitted to toil but not to work.
Then he would retire himself, he would take a last look at
the rolled bundle behind the rafter and blow out the lan*
tern and lie down as he was beside his snoring partner, to
He sweating (on his stomach, he could not bear the touch
of anything to his back) in the whining ovenlike darkness
filled with the forlorn bellowing of alligators, thinking not.
They never gave me time to learn but / had forgot haw
good it is to work.

I<So WILLIAM FAULKNER

Then on the tenth day it happened. It happened for
the third time. At first he refused to believe it, not that
lie felt that now he had served out and discharged his
apprenticeship to mischance, had with the birth of the
child reached and crossed the crest of his Golgotha and
would now be, possibly not permitted so much as ignored,
to descend the opposite slope free-wheeling. That was not
his feeling at alL What he declined to accept was the fact
that a power, a force such as that which had been consist*
ent enough to concentrate upon him with deadly undevia-
tion for weeks, should with all the wealth of cosmic vio-
lence and disaster to draw from, have been so barren of
invention and imagination, so lacking in pride of artistry
and craftmanship, as to repeat itself twice. Once he had
accepted, twice he even forgave, but three times he simply
declined to believe, particularly when he was at last per-
suaded to realise that this third time was to be instigated
not by the blind potency of volume and motion but by
human direction and hands: that now the cosmic joker,
foiled twice, had stooped in its vindictive concentration to
the employing of dynamite.

He did not tell that Doubtless he did not know himself
how it happened, what was happening. But he doubtless
remembered it (but quietly above the thick rich-colored
pristine cigar in his clean steady hand), what he knew,
divined of it It would be evening, the ninth evening, he and
the woman on either side of their host’s empty place at the
evening meal, he hearing the voices from without but not
ceasing to eat, still chewing steadily, because it would be
the same as though he were seeing them anyway — the two
or three or four pirogues floating on the dark water be-
neath the platform on which the host stood, the voices gob-
bling and jabbering, incomprehensible and filled not with
alarm and not exactly with rage or ever perhaps absolute

Old Man 161

surprise but rather just cacophony like those of disturbed
marsh fowl, he (the convict) not ceasing to chew but just
looking up quietly and maybe without a great deal of in-
terrogation or surprise too as the Cajan burst in and stood
before them, wild-faced, glaring, his blackened teeth gaped
against the inky orifice of his distended mouth, watching
(the convict) while the Cajan went through his violent
pantomime of violent evacuation, ejection, scooping some-
thing invisible into his arms and hurling it out and down-
ward and in the instant of completing the gesture chang ing
from instigator to victim of that which he had set into
pantomimic motion, clasping his head and, bowed over
and not otherwise moving, seeming to he swept on and
away before it, crying “Boom! Boom! Booml”, the convict
watching him, his jaw not chewing now, though for just
that moment, thinking. What ? What is it he is trying to
tell me? thinking (this a flash too, since he could not have
expressed this, and hence did not even know that he had
ever thought it) that though his life had been cast here,
circumscribed by this environment, accepted by this en-
vironment and accepting it in turn (and he had done well
here — this quietly, soberly indeed, if he had been able to
phrase it, think it instead of merely knowing it — better than
he had ever dene, who had not even known until now how
good work, making money, could be), yet it was not his
life, he still and would ever be no more than the water
bug upon the surface of the pond, the plumbless and lurk-
ing depths of which he would never know, his only actual
contact with it being the instants when on lonely and glar-
ing mudspits under the pitiless sun and amphitheatred by
his motionless and riveted semicircle of watching pirogues,
he accepted the gambit which he had not elected, entered
the lashing radius of the armed tail and beat at the thrash-
ing and hissing head with his lightwood club, or this fail-

1 6 t WILLIAM FATJLKNLR

in g, embraced without hesitation the armored body itself
with the frail web of flesh and bone in which he walked
and lived and sought the raging life with an eight-inch
knife-blade.

So he and the woman merely watched the Cajan as he
acted out the whole charade of eviction — the little wiry
man gesticulant and wild, his hysterical shadow leaping
and falling upon the rough wall as he went through the
pantomime of abandoning the cabin, gathering in pan-
tomime his meagre belongings from the walls and corners
— objects which no other man would want and only some
power or force like blind water or earthquake or fire would
ever dispossess him of, the woman watching too, her
mouth slightly open upon a mass of chewed food, on her
face an expression of placid astonishment, saying, “What?
What’s he saying?”

“I dont know,” the convict said. “But I reckon if it's
something we ought to know we will find it out when it’s
ready for us to.” Because he was not alarmed, though
by now he had read the other’s meaning plainly enough.
He's fixing to leave , he thought lie s telling me to leave
too — this later, after they had quitted the table and the
Cajan and the woman had gone to bed and the Cajan
had risen from the pallet and approached the convict
and once more went through the pantomime of abandon-
ing the cabin, this time as one repeats a speech which
may have been misunderstood, tediously, carefully repo-
titional as to a child, seeming to hold the convict with one
hand while he gestured, talked, with the other, gesturing
as though in single syllables, the convict (squatting, the
knif e open and the almost-finished paddle across his lap)
watching, nodding his head, even speaking in English:
••Yah; sure. You bet. I got you.” — trimming again at the
paddle but no faster, with no more haste than on any other

Old Man i<5j

night, serene in his belief that when the time came for him
to know whatever it was, that would take care of itself,
having already and without even knowing it, even before
the possibility, the question, ever arose, declined, refused
to accept even the thought of moving also, thinking about
the hides, thinking, If there was just some way he could
tell me where to carry my share to get the money but think-
ing this only for an instant between two delicate strokes of
the blade because almost at once he thought, / reckon as
long as I can catch them I wont have no big trouble find •
ing whoever it is that will buy them.

So the next morning he helped the Cajan load his few
belongings — the pitted rifle, a small bundle of clothing
(again they traded, who could not even converse with one
another, this time the few cooking vessels, a few rusty traps
by definite allocation, and something embracing and ab-
stractional which included the stove, the crude bunk, the
house or its occupancy— something — in exchange for one
alligator hide) — into the pirogue, then, squatting and as
two children divide sticks they divided the hides, separat-
ing them into two piles, one-for-me-and-one-for-you, two-
for-me-and-two-for-you, and the Cajan loaded his share
and shoved away from the platform and paused again,
though this time he only put the paddle down, gathered
something invisibly into his two hands and flung it vio-
lently upward, crying “Boom? Boom?” on a rising inflec-
tion, nodding violently to the half-naked and savagely
scoriated man on the platform who stared with a sort of
grim equability back at him and said, “Sure. Boom* Boom.”
Then the Cajan went on. He did not look back* They
watched him, already paddling rapidly, or the woman did;
the convict had already turned.

“Maybe he was trying to tell us to leave too,” she said.

“Yah,” the convict said. “I thought of that last night

164 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Hand me the paddle.” She fetched it to him — the sapling,
the one he had been trimming at nightly, not quite finished
yet though one more evening would do it (he had been
using a spare one of the Cajan’s. The other had offered to
let him keep it, to include it perhaps with the stove and
the bunk and the cabin’s freehold, but the convict had
declined. Perhaps he had computed it by volume against
so much alligator hide, this weighed against one more eve-
ning with the tedious and careful blade.) — and he departed
too with his knotted rope and mace, in the opposite di-
rection, as though not only not content with refusing to
quit the place he had been warned against, he must estab-
lish and affirm the irrevocable finality of his refusal by
penetrating even further and deeper into it. And then and
without warning the high fierce drowsing of his solitude
gathered itself and struck at him.

He could not have told this if he had tried — this not yet
midmoming and he going on, alone for the first time, no
pirogue emerging anywhere to fall in behind him, but he
had not expected this anyway, he knew that the others
would have departed too; it was not this, it was his very
solitude, his desolation which was now his alone and in
full since he had elected to remain; the sudden cessation
of the paddle, the skiff shooting on for a moment yet while
he thought. What? What? Then, No. No: No, as the silence
and solitude and emptiness roared down upon him in a
jeering bellow: and now reversed, the skiff spun violently
on its heel, he the betrayed driving furiously back toward
the platform where he knew it was already too late, that
citadel where the very crux and dear breath of his life — the
being allowed to work and earn money, that right and
privilege which he believed he had earned to himself un-
aided, asking no favor of anyone or anything save the right
to be let alone to pit his will and strength against the sauric

Old Mm 165

protagonist of a land, a region, which he had not asked
to be projected into — was being threatened, driving the
homemade paddle in grim fury, coming in sight of the
platform at last and seeing the motor launch lying along*
aide it with no surprise at all but actually with a kind of
pleasure as though at a visible justification of his outrage
and fear, the privilege of saying / told you so to Ms own
affronting, driving on toward it in a dreamlike state in
which there seemed to be no progress at all, in which, un-
impeded and suffocating, he strove dreamily with a weight-
less oar, with muscles without strength or resiliency, at a
medium without resistance, seeming to watch the skiff
creep infinitesimally across the sunny water and up to the
platform while a man in the launch (there were five of
them in all) gobbled at him in that same tongue he had
been hearing constantly now for ten days and still knew
no word of, just as a second man, followed by the woman
carrying the baby and dressed again for departure in the
faded tunic and the sunbonnet, emerged from the house,
carrying (the man carried several other things but the
convict saw nothing else) the paper-wrapped bundle which
the convict had put behind the rafter ten days ago and no
other hand had touched since, he (the convict) on the plat-
form too now, holding the skiff’s painter in one hand and
the bludgeon-like paddle in the other, contriving to speak
to the woman at last in a voice dreamy and suffocating and
incredibly calm: “Take it away from him and carry it
back into the house.”

“So you can talk English, can you?” the man in the
launch said. “Why didn’t you come out like they told yon
to last night?”

“Out?” the convict said. Again he even looked, glared,
at the man in the launch, contriving even again to control
his voice: “I aint got time to take trips. I’m busy,” already

1 66 WILLIAM FAULKNER

taming to the woman again, his mouth already open to
repeat as the dreamy buzzing voice of the man came to
him and he turning once more, in a terrific and absolutely
Unbearable exasperation, crying, “Flood? What flood? Hell
a mile, it’s done passed me twice months ago! It’s gonel
What flood?” and then (he did not think this in actual
words either but he knew it, suffered that flashing insight
Into his own character or destiny: how there was a peculiar
quality of repetitiveness about his present fate, how not
only the almost seminal crises recurred with a certain
monotony, but the very physical circumstances followed a
stupidly unimaginative pattern) the man in the launch said,
“Take him” and he was on his feet for a few minutes yet,
lashing and striking in panting fury, then once more on his
back on hard unyielding planks while the four men
swarmed over him in a fierce wave of hard bones and pant-
ing curses and at last the thin dry vicious snapping of hand*
cuffs.

“Damn it, are you mad?” the man in the launch said.
“Cant you understand they are going to dynamite that
levee at noon today? — Come on,” he said to the others.
“Get him aboard. Let’s get out of here.”

“I want my hides and boat,” the convict said.

“Damn your hides,” the man in the launch said. “If
they dont get that levee blowed pretty soon you can hunt
plenty more of them on the capitol steps at Baton Rouge.
And this is all the boat you will need and you can say your
prayers about it.”

“I aint going without my boat,” the convict said. He
said it calmly and with complete finality, so calm, so final
that for almost a minute nobody answered him, they just
stood looking quietly down at him as he lay, half-naked,
blistered and scarred, helpless and manacled hand and
foot, on his back, delivering his ultimatum in a voice peace*
ful and quiet as that in which you talk to your bedfellow

Old Man 167

before going to sleep. Then the man in the launch moved;
he spat quietly over the side and said in a voice as calm
and quiet as the convict’s:

“All right. Bring his boat" They helped the woman,
carrying the baby and the paper-wrapped parcel, into the
launch. Then they helped die convict to his feet and into
the launch too, the shackles on his wrists and ankles clash-
ing. *Td unlock you if you’d promise to behave yourself,"
the man said. The convict did not answer this at alL

“I want to hold the rope," he said.

“The rope?"

“Yes," the convict said. “The rope." So they lowered
Mm into the stern and gave him the end of the painter
after it had passed the towing cleat, and they went on*
The convict did not look back. But then, he did not look
forward either, he lay half sprawled, his shackled legs
before him, the end of the skiffs painter in one shackled
hand. The launch made two other stops; when the hazy
wafer of the intolerable sun began to stand once more
directly overhead there were fifteen people in the launch;
and then the convict, sprawled and motionless, saw the
flat brazen land begin to rise and become a greenish-black
mass of swamp, bearded and convoluted, this in turn stop-
ping short off and there spread before him an expanse of
water embraced by a blue dissolution of shoreline and
glittering thinly under the noon, larger than he had ever
seen before, the sound of the launch’s engine ceasing, the
hull sliding on behind its fading bow-wave. “What are you
doing?" the leader said.

“It’s noon," the helmsman said. “I thought we might
hear the dynamite." So they all* listened, the launch lost
of all forward motion, rocking slightly, die glitter-broken
small waves dapping and whispering at the hull, but no
sound, no tremble even, came anywhere under the fierce
hazy sky; the long moment gathered itself and turned on

l68 WILLIAM FAULKNER

and noon was past “All right,” the leader said. “Let’s go.”
Hie engine started again, the hull began to gather speed.
The leader came aft and stooped over the convict, key in
hand. “I guess you’ll have to behave now, whether yon
want to or not,” he said, unlocking the manacles. "Wont
you?”

"Yes,” the convict said. They went on; after a time the
riiore vanished completely and a little sea got up. The con-
vict was free now but he lay as before, the end of the skiff’s
painter in his hand, bent now with three or four turns
about his wrist; he turned his head now and then to look
back at the towing skiff as it slewed and bounced in the
launch’s wake: now and then he even looked out over the
lake, the eyes alone moving, the face grave and expression-
less, thinking, This is a greater immensity of water, of
waste and desolation , than I have ever seen before; perhaps
not; thinking three or four hours later, the shoreline raised
again and broken into a clutter of sailing sloops and power
cruisers. These are more boats than 1 believed existed, a
maritime race of which I also had no cognizance or perhaps
not thinking it but just watdnng as the launch opened the
shored gut of the ship canal, the low smoke of the city bo*
yond it, then a wharf, the launch slowing in; a quiet crowd
of people watching with that same forlorn passivity he had
seen before and whose race he did recognise even though
he had not seen Vicksburg when he passed it — the brand,
tile unmistakable hallmark of the violently homeless, he
more so than any, who would have permitted no man to
call him one of them.

"All right,” the leader said to him. “Here you are.”

"The boat,” the convict said.

"You’ve got it What do you want me to do — give you
a receipt for it?”

"No,” the convict said. “I just want the boat”

Old Man 169

“Take it. Only you ought to have a bootstrap or some-
thing to carry it in.” (“Carry it in?” the plump convict
said. “Carry it where? Where would you have to cany it?**)

He (the tall one) told that: how he and the woman dis-
embarked and how one of the men helped him haul the
skiff up out of the water and how he stood there with the
end of die painter wrapped around his wrist and the man
bustled up, saying, “All right Next load! Next load!” and
how he told this man too about the boat and the man cried,
“Boat? Boat?” and how he (the convict) went with them
when they carried the skiff over and racked, berthed, it
with the others and how he lined himself up by a Coca-Cola
sign and the arch of a draw bridge so he could find the skiff
again quick when he returned, and how he and the woman
(he carrying the paper -wrapped parcel) were herded into
a truck and after a while the truck began to run in traffic,
between close houses, then there was a big building, an
armory —

“Armory?” the plump one said. “You mean a jail.”

“No. It was a kind of warehouse, with people with
bundles laying on the floor.” And how he thought maybo
his partner might be there and how he even looked about
for the Cajan while waiting for a chance to get back to
the door again, where the soldier was and how he got back
to the door at last, the woman behind him and his chest
actually against the dropped rifle.

“Gwan, gwan,” the soldier said. “Get back. They’ll give
you some clothes in a minute. You cant walk around the
streets that way. And something to eat too. Maybe your
kinfolks will come for you by that time.” And he told that
too: how the woman said,

“Maybe if you told him you had some kinfolks here
lie would let us out.” And how he did not; he could not
have expressed this either, it too deep, too ingrained; he

170 WILLIAM FAULKNER

had never yet had to think it into words through all the
long generations of himself — his hill-man’s sober and
jealous respect not for truth but for the power, the strength,
of lying — not to be niggard with lying but rather to use it
with respect and even care, delicate quick and strong, like
a fine and fatal blade. And how they fetched him clothes
—-a blue jumper and overalls, and then food too (a brisk
starched young woman saying, “But the baby must be
bathed, cleaned. It will die if you dont,” and the woman
saying, “Yessum. He might holler some, he aint never been
bathed before. But he’s a good baby.”) and now it was
night, the unshaded bulbs harsh and savage and forlorn
above the snorers and he rising, gripping the woman awake,
and then the window. He told that: how there were doors
in plenty, leading he did not know where, but he had a
hard time finding a window they could use but he found
one at last, he carrying the parcel and the baby too while
he climbed through first — “You ought to tore up a sheet
and slid down it,” the plump convict said. But he needed no
sheet, there were cobbles under his feet now, in the rich
darkness. The city was there too but he had not seen it yet
and would not — the low constant glare; Bienville had stood
there too, it had been the figment of an emasculate also
calling himself Napoleon but no more, Andrew Jackson
had found it one step from Pennsylvania Avenue. But the
convict found it considerably further than one step back to
the ship canal and the skiff, the Coca-Cola sign dim now,
the draw bridge arching spidery against the jonquil sky at
dawn: nor did he tell, any more than about the sixty-foot
levee, how he got the skiff back into the water. The lake
was behind him now; there was but one direction he could
go. When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He
should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his
life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that

Old Man 17 1

were in store for him. But four weeks later it would look
different from what it did now, and did: he (the Old Man)
had recovered from his debauch, back in banks again, the
Old Man, rippling placidly toward the sea, brown and ricli
as chocolate between levees whose inner faces were wrin-
kled as though In a frozen and aghast amazement, crowned
with the rich green of summer In the willows; beyond
them, sixty feet below, slick mules squatted against the
broad pull of middle-busters in the richened soil which
would not need to be planted, which would need only to
be shown a cotton seed to sprout and make; there would
be the symmetric miles of strong stalks by July, purple
bloom in August, in September the black fields snowed
over, spilled, the middles dragged smooth by the long
sacks, the long black limber hands plucking, the hot air
filled with the whine of gins, the September air then but
now June air heavy with locust and (the towns) the smell
of new paint and the sour smell of the paste which holds
wall paper — the towns, the villages, the little lost wood
landings on stilts on the inner face of the levee, the lower
storeys bright and rank under the new paint and paper and
even the marks on spile and post and tree of May*s raging
water-height fading beneath each bright silver gust of sum-
mer’s loud and inconstant rain; there was a store at tho
levee’s lip, a few saddled and rope-bridled mules in the
sleepy dust, a few dogs, a handful of Negroes sitting on tho
steps beneath the chewing tobacco and malaria medicino
signs, and three white men, one of them a deputy sheriff
canvassing for votes to beat his superior (who had given
him his job) in the August primary, all pausing to watch
the skiff emerge from the glitter-glare of the afternoon
water and approach and land, a woman carrying a child
stepping out, then a man, a tall man who, approaching,
proved to be dressed in a faded but recently washed and

172 WILLIAM FAULKNER

quite clean suit of penitentiary clothing, stopping in the
dust where the mules dozed and watching with pale cold
humorless eyes while the deputy sheriff was still making
toward his armpit that gesture which everyone present re-
alised was to have produced a pistol in one flashing motion
for a considerable time while still nothing came of it It was
apparently enough for the newcomer, however,

“You a officer?” he said.

“You damn right I am,” the deputy said. “Just let me
get this damn gun — ”

“All right,” the other said. “Yonder’s your boat, and
here’s the woman. But I never did find that bastard on
the cottonhouse.”

One of the Governor’s young men arrived at the Peni-
tentiary the next morning. That is, he was fairly young
(he would not see thirty again though without doubt he
did not want to, there being that about him which indi-
cated a character which never had and never would want
anything it did not, or was not about to, possess), a Phi
Beta Kappa out of an Eastern university, a colonel on the
Governor’s statf who did not buy it with a campaign con-
tribution, who had stood in his negligent Eastem-cut
clothes and his arched nose and lazy contemptuous eyes
on the galleries of any number of little lost backwoods
stores and told his stories and received the guffaws of his
©veralled and spitting hearers and with the same look in
his eyes fondled infants named in memory of the last ad-
ministration and in honor (or hope) of the next, and (it
was said of him and doubtless not true) by lazy accident
the behinds of some who were not infants any longer
though still not old enough to vote. He was in the Warden’s
office with a briefcase, and presently the deputy warden of

Old Man 173

the levee was there too. He would have been sent for
presently though not yet, but he came anyhow, without
knocking, with his hat on, calling the Governor’s young
man loudly by a nickname and striking him with a flat
hand on the back and lifted one thigh to the Warden’s
desk, almost between the Warden and the caller, the emis-
sary. Or the vizier with the command, the knotted cord, as
began to appear immediately.

“Well,” the Governor’s young man said, “you’ve played
the devil, haven’t you?” The Warden had a cigar. He had
offered the caller one. It had been refused, though pres-
ently, while the Warden looked at the back of his neck with
hard immobility even a little grim, the deputy leaned and
reached back and opened the desk drawer and took one.

“Seems straight enough to me,” the Warden said. “He
got swept away against his will. He came back as soon as
he could and surrendered.”

“He even brought that damn boat back,” the deputy
said. “If he’d a throwed the boat away he could a walked
back in three days. But no sir. He’s got to bring the boat
back. ‘Here’s your boat and here’s the woman but I never
found no bastard on no cottonhouse.’ ” He slapped his
knee, guffawing. “Them convicts. A mule’s got twice as
much sense.”

“A mule’s got twice as much sense as anything except
a rat,” the emissary said in his pleasant voice. “But that’s
not the trouble.”

“What is the trouble?” the Warden said*

“This man is dead.”

“Hell fire, he aint dead,” the deputy said. “He’s up
yonder in that bunkhouse right now, lying his head off
probly. m take you up there and you can see him*” The
Warden was looking at the deputy.

“Look,” he said. “Bledsoe was trying to tell me some-

174 WILLIAM FATJLKNER

thing about that Kate mule’s leg. You better go up to the
stable and — ”

“I done tended to it,” the deputy said. He didn’t even
look at the Warden. He was watching, talking to, the
emissary. “No sir. He aint — ”

“But he has received an official discharge as being
dead. Not a pardon nor a parole either: a discharge. He’s
either dead, or free. In either case he doesn’t belong here/*
Now both the Warden and the deputy looked at the emis-
sary, the deputy’s mouth open a little, the cigar poised in
his hand to have its tip bitten off. The emissary spoke
pleasantly, extremely distinctly: “On a report of death for-
warded to the Governor by the Warden of the Peniten-
tiary” The deputy closed his mouth, though otherwise he
didn’t move. “On the official evidence of the officer dele-
gated at the time to the charge and returning of the body
of the prisoner to the Penitentiary.” Now the deputy put
the cigar Into his mouth and got slowly off the desk, the
cigar rolling across his lip as he spoke:

“So that’s It Fm to be it, am I?” He laughed shortly,
a stage laugh, two notes. “When I done been right three
times running through three separate administrations?
That’s on a book somewhere too. Somebody in Jackson
can find that too. And if they cant, I can show — ”

“Three administrations?” the emissary said. “Well,
well. That’s pretty good.”

“You damn right it’s good,” the deputy said. “The
woods are full of folks that didn’t.” The Warden was again
watching the back of the deputy’s neck.

“Look,” he said. “Why dont you step up to my house
and get that bottle of whiskey out of the sideboard and
bring it down here?”

“All right,” the deputy said. “But I diink we better
settle this first I’ll tell you what we’ll do — ”

Old Man 175

**We can settle it quicker with a drink or two,” the
Warden said. “You better step on up to your place and
get a coat so the bottle — ”

‘‘That’ll take too long ” the deputy said. “I wont need
no coat” He moved to the door, where he stopped and
turned ‘Til tell you what to do. Just call twelve men in
here and tell him it’s a jury — he never seen but one before
and he wont know no better — and try him over for rob*
bing that train. Hamp can be the judge.”

“You cant try a man twice for the same crime,” tho
emissary said. “He might know that even if he doesn’t
know a jury when he sees one.”

“Look,” the Warden said.

“All right Just call it a new train robbery. Tell him
•it happened yesterday, tell him he robbed another train
while he was gone and just forgot it. He couldn’t help
himself. Besides, he wont care. He’d just as lief be hero
as out He wouldn’t have nowhere to go if he was out
None of them do. Turn one loose and be damned if ho
aint right back here by Christmas like it was a reunion or
something, for doing the very same thing they caught him
at before.” He guffawed again. “Them convicts.”

“Look,” the Warden said. “While you’re there, why
dont you open the bottle and see if the liquor’s any good*
Take a drink or two. Give yourself time to feel it If it’s
not good, no use in bringing it”

“O. K.,” the deputy said. He went out this time.

“Couldn’t you lock the door?” the emissary said* The
Warden squirmed faintly. That is, he shifted his position
in his chair.

“After all, he’s right/* he said. “He’s guessed right three
times now. And he’s kin to all the folks in Pit tma n County
except the niggers.”

“Maybe we can work fast then.” The emissary opened

176 WILLIAM FAULKNER

the briefcase and took out a sheaf of papers. “So there you
are,” he said.

“There what are?”

“He escaped.”

“But he came back voluntarily and surrendered.”

“But he escaped,”

“All right,” the Warden said. “He escaped. Then
what?” Now the emissary said look. That is, he said,

“Listen. I’m on per diem. That’s taxpayers, votes. And
if there’s any possible chance for it to occur to anyone to
hold an investigation about this, there’ll be ten senators
and twenty-five representatives here on a special train
maybe. On per diem. And it will be mighty hard to keep
some of them front going back to Jackson by way of Mem-
phis or New Orleans — on per diem.”

“All right,” the Warden said. “What does he say to do?”

“This. The man left here in charge of one specific offi-
cer. But he was delivered back here by a different one.”

“But he suxreii — ” This time the Warden stopped of his
own accord. He looked, stared almost, at the emissaiy.
“All right Go on.”

“In specific charge of an appointed and delegated offi-
cer, who returned here and reported that the body of the
prisoner was no longer in his possession; that, in fact, he
did not know where the prisoner was. That’s correct, isn’t
it?” The Warden said nothing. “Isn’t that correct?” the
emissary said, pleasantly, insistently.

“But you cant do that to him. I tell you he’s kin to half
the——”

“That’s taken care of. The Chief has made a place for
him on the highway patroL”

“Hell,” the Warden said. “He cant ride a motorcycle,
I dont even let him try to drive a truck.”

“He wont have to. Surely an amazed and grateful state

Old Man tyy

can supply the man who guessed right three times In suc-
cession in Mississippi general elections with a car to ride
in and somebody to run it if necessary. He wont even have
to stay in it all the time. Just so he’s near enough so when
an Inspector sees the car and stops and blows the horn of
it he can hear it and come out.*

“I still dont like it,” the Warden said.

“Neither do L Your man could have saved all of this
If he had just gone on and drowned himself, as he seems
to have led everybody to believe he had. But he didn’t.
And the Chief says do. Can you think of anything better?”
The Warden sighed.

“No” he said.

“All right.” The emissary opened the papers and un-
capped a pen and began to write. “Attempted escape from
the Penitentiary, ten years’ additional sentence,” he said.
“Deputy Warden Buckworth transferred to highway pa-
trol. Call it for meritorious service even if you want to. It
wont matter now. Done?”

“Done,” the Warden said.

“Then suppose you send for him. Get it over with.”
So the Warden sent for the tall convict and he arrived
presently, saturnine and grave, in his new bed-ticking, his
jowls blue and close under the sunburn^ bis hair recently
cut and neatly parted and smelling faintly of the prison
barber’s (the barber was in for life, for murdering his
wife, still a barber) pomade. The Warden called him by
name.

“You had bad luck, didn’t you?” The convict said
nothing. “They are going to have to add ten years to your
time.”

“AH right,” the convict said.

“It’s hard luck. Tm sorry.”

“AH right,” the convict said. “If that’s the rule.” So

178 WILLIAM FAULKNER

they gave him the ten years more and the Warden gave
him the cigar and now he sat, jackknifed backward Into
the space between the upper and lower bunks, the un-
lighted cigar in his hand while die plump convict and four
others listened to him. Or questioned him, that is, since it
was all done, finished, now and he was safe again, so
maybe It wasn’t even worth talking about any more.

“AH right,* the plump one said. “So you come back into
the River. Then what?*

“Nothing. I rowed.*

“Wasn’t it pretty hard rowing coming back?*

“The water was still high. It was running pretty hard
stilL I never made much speed for the first week or two.
After that it got better.* Then, suddenly and quietly, some-
thing — the inarticulateness, die innate and inherited re-
luctance for speech, dissolved and he found himself,
listened to himself, telling it quiedy, the words coming
not fast but easily to the tongue as he required them: how
he paddled on (he found out by trying it that he could
make better speed, if you could call it speed, next the bank
— -this after he had been carried suddenly and violently out
to midstream before he could prevent it and found himself,
the skiff, travelling back toward the region from which ho
had just escaped and he spent the better part of the morn-
ing getting back inshore and up to the canal again from
which he had emerged at dawn) until night came and they
tied up to the bank and ate some of the food he had se-
creted in his jumper before leaving the armory in New
Orleans and the woman and die infant slept in the boat
as usual and when daylight came they went on and tied
up again that night too and the next day the food gave out
and he came to a landing, a town, he didn’t notice the
name of it, and he got a job. It was a cane farm—

“Cane?* one of the other convicts said. “What does any-

Old Man 179

body want to raise cane for? Yon cut cane. You have to
fight it where I come from. You bum it just to get shut of
it*

“It was sorghum,” the tall convict said.

“Sorghum?” another said. “A whole farm just raising
sorghum? Sorghum? What did they do with it?” The tali
one didn’t know. He didn’t ask, he just came up the levee
and there was a truck waiting full of niggers and a white
man said, “You there. Can you run a shovel plow?” and
the convict said, “Yes,” and the man said, “Jump in then, 1 *
and the convict said, “Only I’ve got a — ”

“Yes,” the plump one said. “That’s what I been aiming
to ask. What did — ” The tali convict’s face was grave, his
voice was calm, just a little short:

“They had tents for the folks to live in. They were be*
hind.” The plump one blinked at him.

“Did they think she was your wife?”

“I dont know. I reckon so.” The plump one b linke d at
him.

“Wasn’t she your wife? Just from time to time kind of,
you might say?” The tall one didn’t answer this at all. After
a moment he raised the cigar and appeared to examine a
loosening of the wrapper because after another moment ho
licked the cigar carefully near the end. “All right,” the
plump one said. “Then what?” So he worked there four
days. He didn’t like it Maybe that was why: that he too
could not quite put credence in that much of what he be*
lieved to be sorghum. So when they told him it was Satur*
day and paid him and the white man told him about some*
body who was going to Baton Rouge the next day in a
motor boat, he went to see the man and took the six dol*
lacs he had earned and bought food with it and tied the
skiff behind the motor boat and went to Baton Rouge. It
didn’t take long and even after they left the motor boat at

l8o WILLIAM FAULKNER

Baton Rouge and he was paddling again it seemed to the
convict that the River was lower and the current not so
fast, so hard, so they made fair speed, tying up to the bank
at night among the willows, the woman and baby sleeping
in the skiff as of old. Then the food gave out again. This
time it was a wood landing, the wood stacked and waiting;
a wagon and team being unladen of another load. The men
with the wagon told him about the sawmill and helped him
drag the skiff up the levee; they wanted to leave it there
but he would not so they loaded it onto the wagon too and
.he and the woman got on the wagon too and they went to
the sawmill. They gave them one room in a house to live
in here. They paid two dollars a day and furnish. The work
was hard. He liked it He stayed there eight days.

“If you liked it so well, why did you quit?” the plump
one said. The tall convict examined the cigar again, hold-
ing it up where the light fell upon the rich chocolate-
colored flank.

“I got in trouble,” he said.

“What trouble?”

“Woman. It was a fellow’s wife.”

“You mean you had been toting one piece up and down
the country day and night for over a month, and now the
first time you have a chance to stop and catch your breath
almost you got to get in trouble over another one?” The
tall convict had thought of that He remembered it: how
there were times, seconds, at first when if it had not been
for the baby he might have, might have tried. But they
were just seconds because in the next instant his whole be*
ing would seem to flee the very idea in a kind of savage
and horrified revulsion; he would find himself looking from
a distance at this millstone which the force and power of
blind and risible Motion had fastened upon him, flunking,
saying aloud actually, with harsh and savage outrage even

Old Man 181

though it had been two years since he had had a woman
and that a nameless and not young Negress, a casual, a
straggler whom he had caught more or less by chance on
one of the fifth-Sunday visiting days, the man — husband or
sweetheart— whom she had come to see having been shot
by a trusty a week or so previous and she had not heard
about it: “She aint even no good to me for that.*’

“But you got this one, didn’t you?” the plump convict
said.

“Yah,” the tall one said. The plump one blinked at him.

“Was it good?”

“It’s all good,” one of the others said. “Well? Go on.
How many more did you have on the way back? Some-
times when a fellow starts getting it it looks like he just
cant miss even if — ” That was all, the convict told them.
They left the sawmill fast, he had no time to buy food
until they reached the next landing. There he spent the
whole sixteen dollars he had earned and they went on. The
River was lower now, there was no doubt of it, and sixteen
dollars’ worth looked like a lot of food and he thought
maybe it would do, would be enough. But maybe there
was more current in the River still than it looked like. But
this time it was Mississippi, it was cotton; the plow handles
felt right to his palms again, the strain and squat of the
slick buttocks against the middle-buster’s blade was what
he knew, even though they paid but a dollar a day here.
But that did it. He told it: they told him it was Saturday
again and paid Mm and he told about it — night, a smoked
lantern in a disc of worn and barren earth as smooth as
silver, a circle of crouching figures, the importunate mur-
murs and ejaculations, the meagre piles of worn bills be-
neath the crouching knees, the dotted cubes clicking and
scutteiing in the dust; that did it. “How much did you
win?” the second convict said.

l8* WILLIAM FAULKNER

“Enough,” the tall one said

“But how much?”

“Enough,” the tall one said. It was enough exactly; he
gave it all to the man who owned the second motor boat
(he would not need food now), he and the woman In the
launch now and the skiff towing behind, the woman with
the baby and the paper-wrapped parcel beneath his peace-
ful hand, on his lap; almost at once he recognised, not
Vicksburg because he had never seen Vicksburg, but the
trestle beneath which on his roaring wave of trees and
houses and dead animals he had shot, accompanied by
thunder and lightning, a month and three weeks ago; he
looked at it once without heat, even without interest as the
launch Went on. But now he began to watch the bank, the
levee. He didn’t know how he would know but he knew
he would, and then it was early afternoon and sure enough
the moment came and he said to the launch owner: “I
reckon this will do.”

“Here?” the launch owner said. “This dont look like
anywhere to me.”

“I reckon this is it,” the convict said. So the launch put
Inshore, the engine ceased, it drifted up and lay against
the levee and the owner cast the skiff loose.

“You better let me take you on until we come to some-
thing,” he said. “That was what I promised.”

“I reckon this will do,” the convict said. So they got
out and he stood with the grapevine painter In his hand
while the launch purred again and drew away, already
curving; he did not watch it He laid the bundle down
and made the painter fast to a willow root and picked up
die bundle and turned. He said no word, he mounted the
levee, passing the mark, the tide-line of the old raging, dry
now and lined, traversed by shallow and empty cracks like
foolish and deprecatory senile grins, and entered a willow
chimp and removed the overalls and shirt they had given

Old Man 183

him in New Orleans and dropped them without even look-
ing to see where they fell and opened the parcel and took
out the other, the known, the desired, faded a little, stained
and worn, but clean, recognisable, and put them on and re-
turned to the skiff and took up the paddle. The woman was
already in it

The plump convict stood blinking at him. “So you come
back,” he said. “Well well.” Now they all watched the tall
convict as he bit the end from the cigar neatly and with
complete deliberation and spat it out and licked the bite
smooth and damp and took a match from his pocket and
examined the match for a moment as though to be sure it
was a good one, worthy of the cigar perhaps, and raked
it up his thigh with the same deliberation — a motion almost
too slow to set jure to it, it would seem — and held it until
the flame burned clear and free of sulphur, then put it to
the cigar. The plump one watched him, blinking rapidly
and steadily. “And they give you ten years more for run-
ning. That’s bad. A fellow can get used to what they give
Mm at first, to start off with, I dont care how much it is,
even a hundred and ninety-nine years. But ten more years.
Ten years more, on top of that. When you never expected
it. Ten more years to have to do without no society, no
female companionsMp — ” He blinked steadily at the tall
convict But he (the tall convict) had thought of that too.
He had had a sweetheart. That is, he had gone to church
singings and picnics with her — a girl a year or so younger
than he, short-legged, with ripe breasts and a heavy mouth
and dull eyes like ripe muscadines, who owned a baking-
powder can almost full of earrings and brooches and rings
bought (or presented at suggestion) from ten-cent stores.
Presently he had divulged his plan to her, and there were
times later when, musing, the thought occurred to him that
possibly if it had not been for her he would not actually
have attempted it — this a mere feeling, unworded, since he

184 WILLIAM FAULKNER

could not have phrased this either: that who to know what
Capone’s uncandled bridehood she might not have dreamed
to be her destiny and fate, what fast car filled with au-
thentic colored glass and machine gnns, running traffic
lights. But that was all past and done when the notion first
occurred to him, and in the third month of his incarcera-
tion she came to see him. She wore earrings and a bracelet
or so which he had never seen before and it never became
quite clear how she had got that far from home, and she
cried violently for the first three minutes though presently
(and without his ever knowing either exactly how they had
got separated or how she had made the acquaintance) he
saw her in animated conversation with one of the guards.
But she kissed him before she left that evening and said
she would return the first chance she got, clinging to him,
sweating a little, smelling of scent and soft young female
flesh, slightly pneumatic. But she didn’t come back though
he continued to write to her, and seven months later he got
an answer. It was a postcard, a colored lithograph of a
Birmingham hotel, a childish X inked heavily across one
window, the heavy writing on the reverse slanted and
primer-like too: This is where were honnymonning at .
Your friend (Mrs) Vernon Waldrip

The plump convict stood blinking at the tall one,
rapidly and steadily. “Yes, sir,” he said. u It T s them ten
more years that hurt Ten more years to do without a
woman, no woman a tall a fellow wants — ” He blinked
steadily and rapidly, watching the tall one. The other did
not move, jackknifed backward between the two bunks,
grave and clean, the cigar burning smoothly and richly in
his clean steady hand, the smoke wreathing upward across
his face saturnine, humorless, and calm, “Ten more
years — ”

“Women, — t,” the tall convict said.

THE BEAR

1

THERE was a man and a dog too this time. Two beasts,
counting Old Ben, the bear, and two men, counting Boon
Hogganbeck, in whom some of the same blood ran which
ran in Sam Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebeian
strain of it and only Sam and Old Ben and the mongrel
Lion were taintless and incorruptible.

He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man’s
hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talk-
ing. It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and
older th an any recorded document i ——of white man fatuous

185

l8<S WILLIAM FAULKNER

enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it, of
Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it
had been his to convey; bigger than Major de Spain and
the scrap he pretended to, knowing bettor; older than old
Thomas Sutpen of whom Major de Spain had had it and
who knew better; older even than old Hckemotubbe, the
Chickasaw chief, of whom old Sutpen had had it and who
knew better in his turn. It was of the men, not white nor
black nor red but men, hunters, with the will and hardi-
hood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and
the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed
against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilder-
ness in the ancient and unremitting contest according to
the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets
and brooked no quarter; — the best game of all, the best of
all breathing and forever the best of all listening, the voices
quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and
recollection and exactitude among the concrete trophies—
the racked guns and the heads and skins — in the libraries
of town houses or the offices of plantation houses or (and
best of all) in the camps themselves where the intact and
still-warm meat yet hung, the men who had slain it sitting
before the burning logs on hearths when there were houses
and hearths or about the smoky blazing of piled wood in
front of stretched tarpaulins when there were not There
was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to him
that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and coup*
age and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled
into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and
children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood
they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal
spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the
pagan's base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the
virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute

The Bear 187

to them. Thus it seemed to him on this December morn-
ing not only natural but actually fitting that this should
have begun with whisky.

He realised later that it had begun long before that. It
had already begun on that day when he first wrote his age
In two ciphers and his cousin McCaslin brought him for
the first time to the camp, the big woods, to earn for him-
self from the wilderness the name and state of hunter
provided he in his turn were humble and enduring enough.
He had already inherited then, without ever having seen
it, the big old bear with one trap-ruined foot that in an
area almost a hundred miles square had earned for him-
self a name, a definite designation like a living man: —
the long legend of corn-cribs broken down and rifled, of
shoats and grown pigs and even calves carried bodily into
the woods and devoured and traps and deadfalls over-
thrown and dogs mangled and slain and shotgun and even
rifle shots delivered at point-blank range yet with no more
effect than so many peas blown through a tube by a child
• — a corridor of wreckage and destruction beginning back
before the boy was bom, through which sped, not fast but
rather with the ruthless and irresistible deliberation of
a locomotive, the shaggy tremendous shape. It ran in his
knowledge before he ever saw it. It loomed and towered
in his dreams before he even saw file unaxed woods where
it left its crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed, not
malevolent but just big, too big for the dogs which tried to
bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the
men and the bullets they fired into it; too big for the very
country which was its constricting scope. It was as if the
boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had
not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges
were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with
plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness.

l88 WILLIAM FAULKNER

men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land
where the old bear had earned a name, and through which
r an not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomita-
ble and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom,
epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the little
puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhor-
rence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing
elephant; — the old bear, solitary, indomitable, and alone;
widowered childless and absolved of mortality— old Priam
reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons.

Still a child, with three years then two years then one
year yet before he too could make one of them, each No-
vember he would watch the wagon containing the dogs and
the bedding and food and guns and his cousin McCaslin
and Tennie’s Jim and Sam Fathers too until Sam moved
to the camp to live, depart for the Big Bottom, the big
woods. To him, they were going not to hunt bear and deer
but to keep yearly rendezvous with the bear which they
did not even intend to kill. Two weeks later they would
return, with no trophy, no skin. He had not expected it.
He had not even feared that it might be in the wagon this
time with the other skins and heads. He did not even tell
himself that in three years or two years or one year more
he would be present and that it might even be his gun. He
believed that only after he had served his apprenticeship
in the woods which would prove him worthy to be a
hunter, would he even be permitted to distinguish the
crooked print, and that even then for two November weeks
he would merely make another minor one, along with his
cousin and Major de Spain and General Compson and
Walter Ewell and Boon and the dogs which feared to bay
it and the shotguns and rifles which failed even to bleed
it, in the yearly pageant-rite of the old bear’s furious
immortality.

His day came at last In the surrey with his cousin and

The Bear 189

Major de Spain and General Compson he saw the wilder-
ness through a slow drizzle of November rain just above
the ice point, as it seemed to him later he always saw it or
at least always remembered it — the tall and endless wall
of dense November woods under the dissolving afternoon
and the year’s death, sombre, impenetrable (he could not
even discern yet how, at what point they could possibly
hope to enter it even though he knew that Sam Fathers
was waiting there with the wagon), the surrey moving
through the skeleton stalks of cotton and com in the last
of open country, the last trace of man’s puny gnawing at
the immemorial flank, until, dwarfed by that perspective
into an almost ridiculous diminishment, the surrey itself
seemed to have ceased to move (this too to be completed
later, years later, after he had grown to a man and had
seen the sea) as a solitary small boat hangs in lonely im-
mobility, merely tossing up and down, in the infinite waste
of the ocean while the water and then the apparently im-
penetrable land, which it nears without appreciable prog-
ress, swings slowly and opens the widening inlet which is
the anchorage. He entered it. Sam was waiting, wrapped
in a quilt on the wagon seat behind the patient and steam-
ing mules. He entered his novitiate to the true wilderness
with Sam beside him as he had begun his apprenticeship
in miniature to manhood after the rabbits and such with
Sam beside him, the two of them wrapped in the damp,
warm, Negro-rank quilt while the wilderness closed behind
his entrance as it had opened momentarily to accept him,
opening before his advancement as it closed behind his
progress, no fixed path the wagon followed but a channel
nonexistent ten yards ahead of it and ceasing to exist ten
yards after it had passed, the wagon progressing not by
its own volition but by attrition of their intact yet fluid
circum ambience, drowsing, earless, almost lightless.

It seemed to him that at the age of ten he was witnessing

190 WILLIAM FAULKNER

his own birth. It was not even strange to him. He had ex-
perienced it all before, and not merely in dreams. He saw
the camp — a paintless six-room bungalow set on piles
above the spring high-water — and he knew already how it
was going to look. He helped in the rapid orderly disorder
of their establishment in it and even his motions were
familiar to him, foreknown. Then for two weeks he ate
the coarse, rapid food — the shapeless sour bread, the wild
strange meat, venison and bear and turkey and coon which
he had never tasted before — which men ate, cooked by
men who were hunters first and cooks afterward; he slept
in harsh sheetless blankets as hunters slept. Each morning
the gray of dawn found him and Sam Fathers on the stand,
the crossing, which bad been allotted him. It was the poor-
est one, the most barren. He had expected that; he had not
dared yet to hope even to himself that he would even hear
the running dogs this first time. But he did hear them. It
was on the third morning — a murmur, sourceless, almost
indistinguishable, yet he knew what it was although ho
had never before heard that many dogs running at once,
the murmur swelling into separate and distinct voices until
he could call the five dogs which his cousin owned from
among the others. “Now,” Sam said, “slant your gun up a
little and draw back the hammers and then stand still.”

But it was not for him, not yet The humility was there;
he had learned that And he could learn the patience. He
was only ten, only one week. The instant had passed. It
seemed to him that he could actually see the deer, the buck,
smoke-colored, elongated with speed, vanished, the woods,
the gray solitude still ringing even when the voices of the
dogs had died away; from far away across the sombre
woods and the gray half-liquid morning there came two
shots. “Now let your hammers down,” Sam said*

He did so. “You knew it too,” he said.

The Bear rgi

“Yes,” Sam said. "I want you to learn how to do when
you didn’t shoot. It’s after the chance for the bear or tho
deer has done already come and gone that men and dogs
get killed.”

•Anyway, it wasn’t him,” the boy said. “It wasn’t even
a bear. It was just a deer.”

“Yes,” Sam said, “it was just a deer.”

Then one morning, it was in the second week, he heard
the dogs again. This time before Sam even spoke he readied
the too-long, too-heavy, man-size gun as Sam had taught
him, even though this time he knew the dogs and the deer
were coming less close than ever, hardly within hearing
even. They didn’t sound like any running dogs he had
ever heard before even. Then he found that Sam, who had
taught him first of all to cock the gun and take position
where he could see best in all directions and then never
to move again, had himself moved up beside him. “There,”
he said. “Listen.” The boy listened, to no ringing chorus
strong and fast on a free scent but a moiling yapping an
octave too high and with something more than indecision
and even abjectness in it which he could not yet recognise*
reluctant, not even moving very fast, taking a long time to
pass out of hearing, leaving even then in the air that echo
of thin and almost human hysteria, abject, alm ost humanly
grieving, with this time nothing ahead of it, no sense of a
fleeing unseen smoke-colored shape. He could hear Sam
breathing at his shoulder. He saw the arched curve of tho
old man’s inhaling nostrils.

“It’s Old Beni” he cried, whispering.

Sam didn’t move save for the slow gradual turning of
his head as the voices faded on and the faint steady rapid
arch and collapse of his nostrils. “Hah,” he said. “Not even
running. Walking.”

“But up here!” the boy cried. “Way up here!”

192 WILLIAM FAULKNER

“He do it every year/’ Sam said. “Once. Ash and Boon
say he comes up here to run the other little bears away*
Tell them to get to hell out o£ here and stay out until
the hunters are gone. Maybe.” The boy no longer heard
anything at all, yet still Sam’s head continued to turn
gradually and steadily until the bade of it was toward him*
Then it turned back and looked down at him — the same
face; grave, familiar, expressionless until it smiled, the
same old man’s eyes from which as he watched there faded
slowly a quality darkly and fiercely lambent, passionate
and proud. “He dont care no more for bears than he does
for dogs or men neither. He come to see who’s here, who’s
new in camp this year, whether he can shoot or not, can
stay or not Whether we got the dog yet that can bay and
hold him until a man gets there with a gun. Because he’s
the head bear. He’s the man.” It faded, was gone; again
they were the eyes as he had known them all his life. “He’ll
let them follow him to the river. Then he’ll send them
home. We might as well go too; see how they look when
they get back to camp.”

The dogs were there first, ten of them huddled back
under the kitchen, himself and Sam squatting to peer back
into the obscurity where they crouched, quiet, the eyes
rolling and luminous, vanishing, and no sound, only that
effluvium which the boy could not quite place yet, of some*
thing more than dog, stronger than dog and not just animal,
just beast even* Because there had been nothing in front of
the abject and painful yapping except the solitude, the
wilderness, so that when the eleventh hound got back
about midaftemoon and he and Tennie’s Jim held the
passive and still trembling bitch while Sam daubed her
tattered ear and raked shoulder with turpentine and axle*
grease, it was still no living creature but only the wilder*
ness which, leaning for a moment, had patted lightly once

The Bear 193

her temerity. “Just like a man,” Sam said. “Just like folks.
Put off as long as she could having to be brave, knowing
all the time that sooner or later she would have to be brave
once so she could keep on calling herself a dog, and know-
ing beforehand what was going to happen when die done
it"

He did not know just when Sam left He only knew
that he was gone. For the next three mornings he rose and
ate breakfast and Sam was not waiting for him. He went
to his stand alone; he found it without help now and
stood on it as Sam had taught him. On the third morning
he heard the dogs again, running strong and free on a true
scent again, and he readied the gun as he had learned to
do and heard the hunt sweep past on since he was not
ready yet, had not deserved other yet in just one short
period of two weeks as compared to all the long life which
he had already dedicated to the wilderness with patience
and humility; he heard the shot again, one shot, the single
clapping report of Walter Ewell’s rifle. By now he could
not only find his stand and then return to camp without
guidance, by using the compass his cousin had given him
he reached Walter waiting beside the buck and the moiling
of dogs over the cast entrails before any of the others ex-
cept Major do Spain and Tennie’s Jim on the horses, even
before Uncle Ash arrived with the one-eyed wagon-mule
which did not mind the smell of blood or even, so they said,
of bear.

It was not Uncle Ash on the mule. It was Sam, returned.
And Sam was waiting when he finished his dinner and,
himself on the one-eyed mule and Sam on the other one
of the wagon team, they rode for more tha n three hours
through the rapid shortening sunless afternoon, following
no path, no trail even that he could discern, into a section
of country he had never seen before. Then he understood

194 WILLIAM FAULKNER

why Sam had made him ride the one-eyed mule which
would not spook at the smell of blood, of wild animals.
The other one, the sound one, stopped short and tried to
whirl and bolt even as Sam got down, jerking and wrench-
ing at the rein while Sam held it, coaxing it forward with
his voice since he did not dare risk hitching it, drawing
it forward while the boy dismounted from the marred one
which would stand. Then, standing beside Sam in the
thick great gloom of ancient woods and the winter’s dying
afternoon, he looked quietly down at the rotted log scored
and gutted with claw-marks and, in the wet earth beside it,
the print of the enormous warped two-toed foot. Now he
knew what he had heard in the hounds’ voices in the woods
that morning and what he had smelled when he peered
under the kitchen where they huddled. It was in him too,
a little different because they were brute beasts and he
was not, but only a little different — an eagerness, passive;
an abjectness, a sense of his own fragility and impotence
against the timeless woods, yet without doubt or dread; a
flavor like brass in the sudden run of saliva in his mouth,
a hard sharp constriction in either his brain or his stomach,
he could not tell which and it did not matter; he knew only
that for the first time he realised that the bear which had
run in his listening and loomed in his dreams since before
he could remember and which therefore must have existed
in the listening and the dreams of his cousin and Major de
Spain and even old General Compson before they began
to remember in their turn, was a mortal animal and that
they had departed for the camp each November with no
actual intention of slaying it, not because it could not be
slain but because so far they had no actual hope of being
able to. “It will be tomorrow,” he said.

“You mean we will try tomorrow,” Sam said. “We aint
got the dog yet.”

The Bear 195

“We’ve got eleven,” lie said. “They ran him Monday*

“And you heard them,” Sam said. “Saw them too. We
aint got the dog yet It wont take but one. But he aint
there. Maybe he aint nowhere. The only other way will
be for him to run by accident over somebody that had a
gun and knowed how to shoot it.”

“That wouldn’t be me,” the boy said. “It would be Wal-
ter or Major or ”

“It might,” Sam said. “You watch close tomorrow. Be-
cause he’s smart. That’s how come he has lived this long.
If he gets hemmed up* and has got to pick out somebody to
run over, he will pick out you.”

“How?” he said. “How will he know. . . .” He ceased.
“You mean he already knows me, that I aint never been
to the Big Bottom before, aint had time to find out yet
whether I . . .” He ceased again, staring at Sam; he said
humbly, not even amazed: “It was me he was watching.
I dont reckon he did need to come but once.”

“You watch tomorrow,” Sam said. “I reckon we better
start back. It’ll be long after dark now before we get to
camp.”

The next morning they started three hours earlier than
they had ever done. Even Uncle Ash went, the cook, who
called himself by profession a camp cook and who did little
else save cook for Major de Spain’s hunting and camping
parties, yet who had been marked by the wilderness from
simple juxtaposition to it until he responded as they all
did, even the boy who until two weeks ago had never even
seen the wilderness, to a hound’s ripped ear and shoulder
and the print of a crooked foot in a patch of wet earth.
They rode. It was too far to walk: the boy and Sam and
Uncle Ash in the wagon with the dogs, his cousin and
Major de Spain and General Compson and Boon and Wal-
ter and Tennie 9 s Jim riding double on the horses; again

I9<S WILLIAM FAULKNER

the first gray light found him, as on that first morning two
weeks ago, on the stand where Sam had placed and left
him. With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-
loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de
Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the
first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the
paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a
little bayou whose black still water crept without motion
out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the
cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker
called Lord-to-God by Negroes, clattered at a dead trunk.
It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in inci-
dentals to the one where he had stood each morning for
two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than
that other one which after two weeks he had come to be-
lieve he knew a little — the same solitude, the same loneli-
ness through which frail and timorous man had merely
passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which
looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ances-
tor of Sam Fathers’ Chickasaw predecessors crept into it
and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow
drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the
edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and
cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the
bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order
to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the
earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot He
heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them.
He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short
off, and knew that the bear was looking at him. He never
saw it He did not know whether it was facing him from
the cane or behind him. He did not move, holding the use-
less gun which he knew now he would never fire at it,
now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which

The Bear 197

he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under
the kitchen.

Then it was gone. As abruptly as it had stopped, the
woodpecker’s dry hammering set up again, and after a
while he believed he even heard the dogs — a murmur,
scarce a sound even, which he had probably been hearing
for a time, perhaps a minute or two, before he remarked
it, drifting into hearing and then out again, dying away*
They came nowhere near him. If it was dogs he heard, he
could not have sworn to it; if it was a bear they ran, it
was another bear. It was Sam himself who emerged from
the cane and crossed the bayou, the injured bitch follow-
ing at heel as a bird dog is taught to walk. She came and
crouched against his leg, trembling. “I didn’t see him,” he
said. “I didn’t, Sam.’*

know it,” Sam said. ‘He done the looking. Yon
didn’t hear him neither, did you?”

“No,” the boy said. “I ”

“He’s smart,” Sam said. ‘Too smart” Again the boy
saw in his eyes that quality of dark and brooding lambence
as Sam looked down at the bitch trembling faintly and
steadily against the boy’s leg. From her raked shoulder a
few drops of fresh blood clung like bright berries. “Too
big. We aint got the dog yet. But maybe some day.”

Because there would be a next time, after and after.
He was only ten. It seemed to him that he could see them,
the two of them, shadowy in the limbo from which time
emerged and became time: the old bear absolved of mor-
tality and himself who shared a little of it Because he
recognised now what he had smelled in the huddled dogs
and tasted in his own saliva, recognised fear as a boy, a
youth, recognises the existence of love and passion and
experience which is his heritage but not yet his patrimony,
from entering by chance the presence or perhaps even

198 WILLIAM FAXJLKNER

merely the bedroom of a woman who has loved and been
loved by many men. So I will have to see him, he thought,
without dread or even hope. / will have to look at him. So
it was in June of the next summer. They were at die camp
again, celebrating Major de Spain’s and General Comp*
son’s birthdays. Although the one had been bom in Sep-
tember and the other in the depth of winter and almost
thirty years earlier, each June the two of them and Mo
Caslin and Boon and Walter Ewell (and the boy too from
now on) spent two weeks at the camp, fishing and shooting
squirrels and turkey and running coons and wildcats with
the dogs at night. That is, Boon and the Negroes (and the
boy too now) fished and shot squirrels and ran the coons
and cats, because the proven hunters, not only Major de
Spain and old General Compson (who spent those two
weeks sitting in a rocking chair before a tremendous iron
pot of Brunswick stew, stirring and tasting, with Uncle
Ash to quarrel with about how he was making it and Ten-
nie’s Jim to pour whisky into the tin dipper from which he
drank it) but even McCaslin and Walter Ewell who were
still young enough scorned such, other than shooting the
wild gobblers with pistols for wagers or to test their marks-
manship.

That is, his cousin McCaslin and the others thought he
was hunting squirrels. Until the third evening he believed
that Sam Fathers thought so too. Each morning he would
leave the camp right after breakfast. He bad his own gun
sow, a new breech-loader, a Christmas gift; he would own
and shoot it for almost seventy years, through two new
pairs of barrels and locks and one new stock, until all that
remained of the original gun was the silver-inlaid trigger*
guard with his and McCaslin’s engraved names and the
date in 1878. He found the tree beside the little bayon
where he had stood that morning. Using the compass he

The Beat 199

tanged from that point; he was teaching himself to be
better than a fair woodsman without even knowing he
was doing it On the third day he even found the gutted
log where he had first seen the print It was almost com-
pletely crumbled now, healing with unbelievable speed, a
passionate and almost visible relinquishment, back into the
earth from which the tree had grown. He ranged the sum-
mer woods now, green with gloom, if anything actually
dimmer than they had been in November’s gray dissolu-
tion, where even at noon the sun fell only in windless
dappling upon the earth which never completely dried and
which crawled with snakes — moccasins and watersnakes
and rattlers, themselves the color of the dappled gloom so
that he would not always see them until they moved; re-
turning to camp later and later and later, first day, second
day, passing in the twilight of the third evening the little
log pen enclosing the log bam where Sam was putting
up the stock for the night, “You aint looked right yet,’*
Sam said.

He stopped. For a moment he didn’t answer. Then he
said peacefully, in a peaceful rushing burst, as when a
boy’s miniature dam in a little brook gives way: “All right.
Yes. But how? I went to the bayou. I even found that log
again. I ”

“I reckon that was all right Likely he’s been watching
you. You never saw his foot?”

“I . . .” the boy said. “I didn’t ... I never thought

• • .

“It’s the gun,” Sam said. He stood beside the fence,
motionless, the old man, son of a Negro slave and a Chicka-
saw chief, in the battered and faded overalls and the
frayed five-cent straw hat which had been the badge of
the Negro’s slavery and was now the regalia of his free-
dom. The camp — the clearing, the house, the bam and its

200 WILLIAM FAULKNER

tiny lot with which Major de Spain in his tarn had
scratched punily and evanescently at the wilderness — faded
in the dusk, back into the immemorial darkness of the
woods. The gun, the boy thought The gun. “You will have
to choose Sam said.

He left the next morning before light, without break-
fast, long before Uncle Ash would wake in his quilts on
the kitchen floor and start the fire. He had only the com-
pass and a stick for the snakes. He could go almost a mile
before he would need to see the compass. He sat on a log,
the invisible compass in his hand, while the secret night-
sounds which had ceased at his movements, scurried again
and then fell still for good and the owls ceased and gave
over to the waking day birds and there was light in the
gray wet woods and he could see the compass. He went
fast yet still quietly, becoming steadily better and better
as a woodsman without yet having time to realise it; he
jumped a doe and a fawn, walked them out of the bed,
close enough to see them — the crash of undergrowth, the
white scut, the fawn scudding along behind her, faster
than he had known it could have run. He was hunting
right, upwind, as Sam had taught him, but that didn’t
matter now. He had left the gun; by his own will and re-
linquishment he had accepted not a gambit, not a choice,
but a condition in which not only the bear’s heretofore in-
violable anonymity but all the ancient rules and balances
of hunter and hunted had been abrogated. He would not
even be afraid, not even in the moment when the fear
would take him completely; blood, skin, bowels, bones,
memory from the long time before it even became his
memory — all save that thin clear quenchless lucidity which
alone differed him from this bear and from all the other
bears and bucks he would follow during almost seventy
years, to which Sam had said: “Be scared. You cant help

201

The Bear

that But dont be afraid. Aint nothing In the woods going
to hurt you if you dont comer it or it dont smell that you
ere afraid. A bear or a deer has got to be scared of a
coward the same as a brave man has got to be.”

By noon he was far beyond the crossing on the little
bayou, farther into the new and alien country than he had
ever been, travelling now not only by the compass but by
the old, heavy, biscuit-thick silver watch which had been
his father’s. He had left the camp nine hours ago; nine
hours from now, dark would already have been an hour
old. He stopped, for the first time since he had risen from
the log when he could see the compass face at last, and
looked about, mopping his sweating face on his sleeve. He
had already relinquished, of his will, because of his need,
in humility and peace and without regret, yet apparently
that had not been enough, the leaving of the gun was not
enough. He stood for a moment — a child, alien and lost
in the green and soaring gloom of the markless wilderness.
Then he relinquished completely to it It was the watch
and the compass. He was still tainted. He removed the
linked chain of the one and the looped thong of the other
from his overalls and hung them on a bush and leaned the
stick beside them and entered it.

When he realised he was lost, he did as Sam had coached
and drilled him: made a cast to cross his backtrack. He
had not been going very fast for the last two or three hours,
and he had gone even less fast since he left the compass
and watch on the bush. So he went slower still now, since
the tree could not be very far; in fact, he found it before he
really expected to and turned and went to it. But there
was no bush beneath it, no compass nor watch, so he did
next as Sam had coached and drilled him: made this next
circle in the opposite direction and much larger, so that the
pattern of the two of them would bisect his track some-

202 WILLIAM FAULKNER

where, but crossing no trace nor mark anywhere of his
feet or any feet, and now he was going faster though still
not panicked, his heart beating a little more rapidly but
strong and steady enough, and this time it was not even
the tree because there was a down log beside it which he
had never seen before and beyond the log a little swamp,
a seepage of moisture somewhere between earth and water,
and he did what Sam had coached and drilled him as the
next and the last, seeing as he sat down on the log the
crooked print, the warped indentation in the wet ground
which while he looked at it continued to fill with water
until it was level full and the water began to overflow and
the sides of the print began to dissolve away. Even as be
looked up he saw the next one, and, moving, the one be-
yond it; moving, not hurrying, running, but merely keep-
ing pace with them as they appeared before him as though
they were being shaped out of thin air just one constant
pace short of where he would lose them forever and be
lost forever himself, tireless, eager, without doubt or dread,
panting a little above the strong rapid little hammer of his
heart, emerging suddenly into a little glade; and the wilder-
ness coalesced. It rushed, soundless, and solidified — the
tree, the bush, the compass and the watch glinting where
a ray of sunlight touched them. Then he saw the bear. It
did not emerge, appear: it was just there, immobile, fixed
in the green and windless noon’s hot dappling, not as big
as he had dreamed it but as big as he had expected, bigger,
dimensionless against the dappled obscurity, looking at
him. Then it moved. It crossed the glade without haste,
walking for an instant into the sun’s full glare and out of it,
and stopped again and looked back at him across one
shoulder. Then it was gone. It didn’t walk into the woods.
It faded, sank back into the wilderness without motion as
he had watched a fish, a huge old bass, sink back into

The Bear 203

the dark depths of its pool and vanish without even any
movement of its fins.

2

So he should have hated and feared Lion. He was thir-
teen then. He had killed his buck and Sam Fathers had
marked his face with the hot blood, and in the next No-
vember he killed a bear. But before that accolade he had
become as competent in the woods as many grown men
with the same experience. By now he was a better woods-
man than most grown men with more. There was no terri-
tory within twenty-five miles of the cainp that he did not
know — bayou, ridge, landmark trees and path; he could
have led anyone direct to any spot in it and brought him
back. He knew game trails that even Sam Fathers had
never seen; in the third fall he found a buck’s bedding-
place by himself and unbeknown to his cousin he bo r*
rowed Walter Ewell’s rifle and lay in wait for the buck at
dawn and killed it when it walked back to the bed as Sam
had told him how the old Chickasaw fathers did.

By now he knew the old bear’s footprint better than ho
did his own, and not only the crooked one. He could sea
any one of the three sound prints and distinguish it at once
from any other, and not only because of its size. There were
other bears within that fifty miles which left tracks almost
as large, or at least so near that the one would have ap-
peared larger only by juxtaposition. It was more than that.
If Sam Fathers had been his mentor and the backyard
rabbits and squirrels his kindergarten, then the wilderness
the old bear ran was his college and the old male bear
itself, so long tmwifed and childless as to have become its
own nngendered progenitor, was his alma mater.

204 WILLIAM FAULKNER

He could find the crooked print now whenever he
wished, ten miles or five miles or sometimes closer than
that, to the camp. Twice while on stand during the next
three years he heard the dogs strike its trail and once even
jump it by chance, the voices high, abject, almost human
In their hysteria. Once, still-hunting with Walter Ewell’s
rifle, he saw it cross a long corridor of down timber where
a tornado had passed. It rushed through rather than across
the tangle of trunks and branches as a locomotive would,
faster than he had ever believed it could have moved, al-
most as fast as a deer even because the deer would have
spent most of that distance in the air; he realised then why
it would take a dog not only of abnormal courage but size
and speed too ever to bring it to bay. He had a little dog
at home, a mongrel, of the sort called fyce by Negroes, a
ratter, itself not much bigger than a rat and possessing that
sort of courage which had long since stopped being bravery
and had become foolhardiness. He brought it with him one
June and, timing them as if they were meeting an appoint-
ment with another human being, himself carrying the fyce
with a sack over its head and Sam Fathers with a brace of
the hounds on a rope leash, they lay downwind of the trail
and actually ambushed the bear. They were so close that
it turned at bay although he realised later this might have
been from surprise and amazement at the shrill and frantic
uproar of the fyce. It turned at bay against the trunk of
a big cypress, on its hind feet; it seemed to die boy that it
would never stop rising, taller and taller, and even the two
hounds seemed to have taken a kind of desperate and de-
spairing courage from the fyce. Then he realised that the
fyce was actually not going to stop. He flung the gun down
and ran. When he overtook and grasped the shrill, fran-
tically pinwheeling little dog, it seemed to him that he was
directly under the bear. He could smell it, strong and hot

The Bear 205

end rank. Sprawling, lie looked up where it loomed and
towered over him like a thunderclap. It was quite familiar,
until he remembered: this was the way he had used to
dream about it

Then it was gone. He didn’t see it go. He knelt, holding
the frantic fyce with both hands, hearing the abased wail-
ing of the two hounds drawing further and further away,
until Sam came up, carrying the gun. He laid it quietly
down beside the boy and stood looking down at him.
"You’ve done seed him twice now, with a gun in your
hands,” he said. "This time you couldn’t have missed him.”

The boy rose. He still held the fyce. Even in his arms
it continued to yap frantically, surging and straining toward
the fading sound of the hounds like a collection of live-
wire springs. The boy was panting a little. "Neither could
you,” he said. "You had the gun. Why didn’t you shoot
him?”

Sam didn’t seem to have heard. He put out his hand
and touched the little dog in the boy’s arms which still
yapped and strained even though the two hounds were out
of hearing now. "He’s done gone,” Sam said. "You can
slack off and rest now, until next time.” He stroked the
little dog until it began to grow quiet under his hand.
"You’s almost the one we wants,” he said. "You just aint
big enough. We aint got that one yet. He will need to be
just a little bigger than smart, and a little braver than
either.” He withdrew his hand from the fyce’s head and
stood looking into the woods where the bear and the
hounds had vanished. "Somebody is going to, some day.”

"I know it,” the boy said. "That’s why it must be one
of us. So it wont be until the last day. When even he dont
want it to last any longer.”

So he should have hated and feared lion. It was in the
fourth s umm er, the fourth time he had made one in the

20 6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

celebration of Major de Spain’s and General Compson’s
birthday. In the early spring Major de Spain’s mare had
foaled a horse colt One evening when Sam brought the
horses and mules up to stable them for the night, the
colt was missing and it was all he could do to get the frantic
maze Into the lot. He had thought at first to let the mare
lead him back to where she had become separated from the
foal. But she would not do it. She would not even feint
toward any particular part of the woods or even in any par-
ticular direction. She merely ran, as if she couldn’t see, still
frantic with terror. She whirled and ran at Sam once, as if
to attack him in some ultimate desperation, as if she could
not for the moment realise that he was a man and a long-
familiar one. He got her into the lot at last. It was too dark
by that time to back-track her, to unravel the erratic course
she had doubtless pursued.

He came to the house and told Major de Spain. It was
an animal, of course, a big one, and the colt was dead now,
wherever it was. They all knew that “It’s a panther,” Gen-
eral Compson said at once. “The same one. That doe and
fawn last March.” Sam had sent Major de Spain word of
it when Boon Hogganbeck came to the camp on a routine
visit to see how the stock had wintered — the doe’s throat
tom out, and the beast had run down the helpless fawn
and lolled it too.

“Sam never did say that was a panther ” Major de Spain
said. Sam said nothing now, standing behind Major de
Spain where they sat at supper, inscrutable, as if he were
just waiting for them to stop talking so he could go home.
He didn’t even seem to be looking at anything. “A panther
might jump a doe, and he wouldn’t have much trouble
catching the fawn afterward. But no panther would have
jumped that colt with the dam right there with it It was
Old Ben,” Major de Spain said. “I’m disappointed in him.

The Bear 207

He has broken the rules. I didn’t think he would have done
that. He has killed mine and McCaslin’s dogs, but that was
all right. We gambled the dogs against him; we gave each
other warning. But now he has come into my house and
destroyed my property, out of season too. He broke the
rules. It was Old Ben, Sam." Still Sam said nothing, stand-
ing there until Major de Spain should stop talking. “We’ll
back-track her tomorrow and see,” Major de Spain said.

Sam departed. He would not live in the camp; he had
built himself a little hut something like Joe Baker’s, only
stouter, tighter, on the bayou a quarter-mile away, and a
stout log crib where he stored a little com far the shoat he
raised each year. The next morning he was waiting when
they waked. He had already found the colt. They did not
even wait for breakfast It was not far, not five hundred
yards from the stable — the three-months’ colt lying on its
side, its throat tom out and the entrails and one ham partly
eaten. It lay not as if it had been dropped but as if it had
been struck and hurled, and no cat-mark, no daw-mark
where a panther would have gripped it while finding its
throat They read the tracks where the frantic mare had
circled and at last rushed in with that same ultimate des-
peration with which she had whirled on Sam Fathers yes-
terday evening, and the long tracks of dead and terrified
running and those of the beast which had not even rushed
at her when she advanced bat had merely walked three
or four paces toward her until she broke, and General
Compson said, “Good God, what a wolf I”

Still Sam said nothing. The boy watched him while the
men knelt, measuring the tracks. There was something in
Sam’s face now. It was neither exultation nor joy nor hope.
Later, a man, the boy realised what it had been, and that
Sam had known all the time what had made the tracks and
what had tom the throat out of the doe in the spring and

208 WILLIAM FAULKNER

killed the fawn. It had been foreknowledge in Sam’s fee©
that morning. And he was glad, he told himself. He was
old . He had no children, no people, none of his blood any-
where above earth that he would ever meet again. And
even if he were to, he could not have touched it, spoken
to it, because for seventy years now he had had to be a
Negro . It was almost over now and he was glad .

They returned to camp and had breakfast and came
back with guns and the hounds. Afterward the boy realised
that they also should have known then what killed the colt
as well as Sam Fathers did. But that was neither the first
nor the last time he had seen men rationalise from and even
act upon their misconceptions. After Boon, standing astride
the colt, had whipped the dogs away from it with his belt,
they snuffed at the tracks. One of them, a young dog hound
without judgment yet, bayed once, and they ran for a few
feet on what seemed to be a trail. Then they stopped, look*
ing back at the men, eager enough, not baffled, merely
questioning, as if they were asking “Now what?** Then
they rushed back to the colt, where Boon, still astride it,
slashed at them with the belt.

“I never knew a trail to get cold that quick,” General
Compson said.

“Maybe a single wolf big enough to kill a colt with the
dam right there beside it dont leave scent,” Major de Spain
said.

“Maybe it was a hant,” Walter Ewell said. He looked
at Tennie’s Jim. “Hah, Jim?”

Because the hounds would not run it. Major de Spain
had Sam hunt out and find the tracks a hundred yards
farther on and they put the dogs on it again and again
the young one bayed and not one of them realised then
that the honnd was not baying like a dog striking game but
was merely bellowing like a country dog whose yard has

The Bear 209

been invaded. General Compson spoke to the boy and
Boon and Tennie’s Jim: to the squirrel hunters. “You boys
keep the dogs with you this morning. He’s probably hang*
tag around s omewher e, waiting to get his breakfast off the
colt. You might strike Mm"

But they did not The boy remembered hpw Sam stood
watching them as they went into the woods with the
leashed hounds — the Indian face in which he had never
seen anything until it smiled, except that faint arching of
the nostrils on that first morning when the hounds had
found Old Ben. They took the hounds with them on the
next day, though when they reached the place where they
hoped to strike a fresh trail, the carcass of the colt was
gone. Then on the third morning Sam was waiting again,
this time until they had finished breakfast He said,
“Come.” He led them to his house, his little hut, to the
corn-crib beyond it He had removed the com and had
made a deadfall of the door, baiting it with the colt’s car-
cass; peering between the logs, they saw an animal almost
the color of a gun or pistol barrel, what little time they had
to examine its color or shape. It was not crouched nor even
standing. It was in motion, in the air, coming toward them
— a heavy body crashing with tremendous force against
the door so that the thick door jumped and clattered in its
frame, the animal, whatever it was, hurling itself against
the door again seemingly before it could have touched the
floor and got a new purchase to spring from. “Come away,”
Sam said, ’Tore he break his neck.” Even when they re*
treated the heavy and measured crashes continued, the
stout door jumping and clattering each time, and still no
sound from the beast itself — no snarl, no cry.

“What in hell’s name is it?” Major de Spain said.

“It’s a dog,” Sam said, his nostrils arching and collapsing
faintly and steadily and that faint, fierce milkiness in his

210 WILLIAM FAULKNER

eyes again as on that first morning when the hounds M
struck the old bear* “It’s the dog** 9
“The dog?” Major de Spain said*

“That** gontcr hold Old Ben*”

“Dog the devil,* Major do Spain said* *Td rather have
Old Ben himself in my pack than that brute. Shoot him.*
“No* Sam said*

“You’ll never tame him* How do you ever expect to
make an animal like that afraid of you?*

“I dont want him tame,* Sam said; again the boy
•watched his nostrils and the fierce milky light in his eyes*
“But I almost rather he be tame than scared, of me or any
man or any thing. But he wont be neither, of nothing.*
“Then what are you going to do with it?*

“Yon can watch,* Sam said.

Each morning through the second week they would go
to Sam’s crib. He had removed a few shingles from the roof
and had put a rope on the colt’s carcass and had drawn it
out when the trap fclL Each morning they would watch
him lower a pail of water into the crib while the dog
hurled itself tirelessly against the door and dropped back
and leaped again. It never made any sound and there was
nothing frenzied in the act but only a cold and grim in-
domitable determination. Toward the end of the week it
stopped jumping at the door. Yet it had not weakened ap-
preciably and it was not as if it had rationalised the fact
that the door was not going to give* It was as if for that
time it simply disdained to jump any longer. It was not
down. None of them had ever seen it down. It stood, and
they could see it now — part mastiff, something of Airedale
and something of a dozen other strains probably, better
than thirty inches at the shoulders and weighing as they
guessed almost ninety pounds, with cold yellow eyes and
a tremendous chest and over all that strange color like a
blued gun-barrel.

211

The Bear

Then the two weeks were up. They prepared to break
camp. The boy begged to remain and his cousin let him.
He moved into the little hut with Sam Fathers. Each mom*
ing he watched Sam lower the pail of water Into the crib.
By die end of that week the dog was down. It would rise
and half stagger, half crawl to the water and drink and
collapse again. One morning it could not even reach tho
water, could not raise its forequarters even from the floor.
Sam took a short stick and prepared to enter the crib.
•Wait,” the boy said. “Let me get the gun ”

“No,” Sam said. “He cant move now.” Nor could ft. It
lay on its side while Sam touched it, its head and the
gaunted body, the dog lying motionless, the yellow eyes
open. They were not fierce and there was nothing of petty
malevolence in them, but a cold and almost impersonal
malignance like some natural force. It was not even looking
at Sam nor at the boy peering at it between the logs.

Sam began to feed it again. The first time he had to
raise its head so it could lap the broth. That night he left
a bowl of broth containing lumps of meat where the dog
could reach it. The next morning the bowl was empty and
the dog was lying on its belly, its head up, the cold yellow
eyes watching the door as Sara entered, no change what*
ever in the cold yellow eyes and still no sound from it even
when it sprang, its aim and co-ordination still bad from
weakness so that Sam had time to strike it down with tho
stick and leap from the crib and slam the door as the dog,
still without having had time to get its feet under it to
jump again seemingly, hurled itself against the door as if
the two weeks of starving had never been.

At noon that day someone came whooping through the
woods from the direction of the camp. It was Boon. He
came and looked for a while between the logs, at the tre-
mendous dog lying again on its belly, its head up, the yel-
low eyes blinking sleepily at nothing: the indomitable and

212 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Unbroken spirit “What we better do,” Boon said, “is to let
that son of a bitch go and catch Old Ben and run him
on the dog.” He turned to the boy his weather-reddened
and beetling face. “Get your traps together. Cass says for
you to come on home. You been in here fooling with that
horse-eating varmint long enough.”

Boon had a borrowed mule at the camp; the buggy was
waiting at the edge of the bottom. He was at home that
night. He told McCaslin about it “Sam’s going to starve
him again until he can go in and touch him. Then he will
feed him again. Then he will starve him again, if he has
to.”

“But why?” McCaslin said. “What for? Even Sam will
never tame that brute.”

“We dont want him tame. We want him like' he is. Wo
just want him to find out at last that the only way he can
get out of that crib and stay out of it is to do what Sam
or somebody tells him to do. He’s the dog that’s going to
stop Old Ben and hold him. We've already named him.
His name is lion.”

Then November came at last They returned to the
camp. With General Compson and Major do Spain and his
cousin and Walter and Boon he stood in the yard among
the guns and bedding and boxes of food and watched Sam
Fathers and lion come up the lane from the lot — the In-
dian, the old man in battered overalls and rubber boots
and a worn sheepskin coat and a hat which had belonged
to the boy’s father; the tremendous dog pacing gravely be-
side him. The hounds rushed out to meet them and
stopped, except the young one which still had but little of
judgment It ran up to Lion, fawning. lion didn’t snap at
it He didn’t even pause. He struck it rolling and yelping for
five or six feet with a blow of one paw as a bear would
have done and came on into the yard and stood, blinking

The Bear 213

sleepily at nothing, looking at no one, while Boon said,
“Jesus. Jesus. — Will he let me touch him?”

“You can touch him,” Sam said. “He dont care. He dont
care about nothing or nobody.”

The boy watched that too. He watched it for the next
two years from that moment when Boon touched Lion’s
head and then knelt beside him, feeling the bones and
muscles, the power. It was as if Lion were a woman — or
perhaps Boon was the woman. That was more like it — the
big, grave, sleepy-seeming dog which, as Sam Fathers said,
cared about no man and no thing; and the violent, insensi-
tive, hard-faced man with his touch of remote Indian blood
and the mind almost of a child. He watched Boon take
over Lion’s feeding from Sam and Uncle Ash both. He
would see Boon squatting in the cold rain beside the
kitchen while Lion ate. Because Lion neither slept nor ate
with the other dogs though none of them knew where he
did sleep until in the second November, thinking until
then that Lion slept in his kennel beside Sam Fathers’ hut,
when the boy’s cousin McCaslin said something about it
to Sam by sheer chance and Sam told him. And that night
the boy and Major de Spain and McCaslin with a lamp
entered the back room where Boon slept — the little, tight,
airless room rank with the smell of Boon’s unwashed body
and his wet hunting clothes — where Boon, snoring on his
back, choked and waked and Lion raised his head beside
him and looked back at them from his cold, slumbrous
yellow eyes.

“Damn it, Boon,” McCaslin said. “Get that dog out of
here. He’s got to run Old Ben tomorrow morning. How in
hell do you expect him to smell anything fainter than a
skunk after breathing you all night?”

“The way I smell aint hurt my nose none that I ever
noticed,” Boon said.

*14 WILLIAM FAULKNER

“It wouldn’t matter if it had/’ Major de Spain said
••We're not depending on you to trail a bear. Put him out-
ride. Put him under the house with the other dogs.”

Boon began to get up. “He’ll kill the first one that hap-
pens to yawn or sneeze in his face or touches him.”

“I reckon not,” Major de Spain said “None of them are
going to risk yawning in his face or touching him either,
even asleep. Put him outside. I want his nose right tomor-
row. Old Ben fooled him last year. I dont think he will do
It again.”

Boon put on his shoes without lacing them; in his long
soiled underwear, his hair still tousled from sleep, he and
Lion went out. The others returned to the front room and
the poker game where McCaslin's and Major de Spain’s
hands waited for them on the table. After a while McCaslin
said, “Do you want me to go back and look again?”

“No,” Major de Spain said. “I call,” he said to Walter
Ewell. He spoke to McCaslin again. “If you do, dont tell
me. I am beginning to see the first sign of my increasing
age: I dont like to know that my orders have been dis-
obeyed, even when I knew when I gave them that they
would be. — A small pair,” he said to Walter EwelL

“How small?” Walter said.

“Very small,” Major de Spain said.

And the boy, lying beneath his piled quilts and blankets
waiting for sleep, knew likewise that Lion was already back
in Boon’s bed, for the rest of that night and the next one
and during all the nights of the next November and the
next one. He thought then: 1 wonder what Sam thinks .
He could have Lion with him , even if Boon is a white man .
He could ask Major or McCaslin either . And more than
that . It was Sam's hand that touched Lion first and Lion
knows it . Then he became a man and he knew that too.
It had been all right. That was the way it should have been.

The Bear 215

Sam was the chief, the prince; Boon, the plebeian, was his
huntsman. Boon should have nursed the dogs.

On the first morning that Lion led the pack after Old
Ben, seven strangers appeased In the camp. They were
swampers: gaunt, malaria-ridden men appearing from no*
where, who ran trap-lines for coons or perhaps farmed little
patches of cotton and com along the edge of the bottom,
in clothes but little better than Sam Fathers* and nowhere
near as good as Tennie’s Jim’s, with worn shotguns and
rifles, already squatting patiently in the cold drizzle in the
side yard when day broke. They had a spokesman; after-
ward Sam Fathers told Major de Spain how all during the
past summer and fall they had drifted into the camp
singly or in pairs and threes, to look quietly at lion for a
while and then go away: “Mawnin, Major. We heerd you
was aimin to put that ere blue dawg on that old two-toed
bear this mawnin. We figgered we*d come up and watch,
if you dont mind. We wont do no shooting, lessen he runs
over us.”

“You are welcome,” Major de Spain said. “You are wel-
come to shoot He’s more your bear than ours.”

“I reckon that aint no lie. I done fed him enough cawn
to have a sheer in him. Not to mention a skoat three years
ago.”

“I reckon I got a sheer too,” another said. “Only it aint
in the bear.” Major de Spain looked at him. He was chew-
ing tobacco. He spat “Hit was a heifer calf. Nice un too.
Last year. When I finally found her, I reckon she looked
about like that colt of youm looked last June.”

“Oh,” Major de Spain said. “Be welcome. If you see
game in front of my dogs, shoot it”

Nobody shot Old Ben that day. No man saw him. The
dogs jumped him within a hundred yards of the glade
where the boy had seen him that day in the summer of

216 WILLIAM FAULKNER

his eleventh year. The boy was less than a quarter-mile
away. He heard the jump but he could distinguish no voice
among the dogs that he did not know and therefore would
be Lion’s, and he thought, believed, that lion was not
among them. Even the fact that they were going much
faster than he had ever heard them run behind Old Ben
before and that the high thin note of hysteria was missing
now from their voices was not enough to disabuse him.
He didn’t comprehend until that night, when Sam told
him that Lion would never cry on a trail. “He gonter growl
when he catches Old Ben’s throat," Sam said. “But he
aint gonter never holler, no more than he ever done when
he was jumping at that two-inch door. It’s that blue dog
In him. What you call it?”

"Airedale,” the boy said.

Lion was there; the jump was just too close to the river.
When Boon returned with Lion about eleven that night,
he swore that Lion had stopped Old Ben once but that the
hounds would not go in and Old Ben broke away and took
to the river and swam for miles down it and he and Lion
went down one bank for about ten miles and crossed and
came up the other but it had begun to get dark before they
struck any trail where Old Ben had come up out of the
water, unless he was still in the water when he passed the
ford where they crossed. Then he fell to cursing the hounds
and ate the supper Uncle Ash had saved for him and went
off to bed and after a while the boy opened the door of the
little stale room thunderous with snoring and the great
grave dog raised its head from Boon’s pillow and blinked
at him for a moment and lowered its head again.

When the next November came and the last day, the
day which it was now becoming traditional to save for
Old Ben, there were more than a dozen strangers waiting.
They were not all swampers this time. Some of them were

The Bear 217

townsmen, from other county seats like Jefferson, who had
heard about Lion and Old Ben and had come to watch
the great blue dog keep his yearly rendezvous with the old
twotoed bear. Some of them didn’t even have guns and the
hunting clothes and boots they wore had been on a store
shelf yesterday.

This time Lion jumped Old Ben more than five
from the river and bayed and held him and this time the
hounds went in, in a sort of desperate emulation. The boy
heard them; he was that near. He heard Boon whooping;
he heard the two shots when General Compson delivered
both barrels, one containing five buckshot, the other a
single ball, into the bear from as dose as he could force
his almost unmanageable horse. He heard the dogs when
the bear broke free again. He was running now; panting,
stumbling, bis lungs bursting, he reached the place where
General Compson had fired and where Old Ben had killed
two of the hounds. He saw the blood from General Comp-
son’s shots, but he could go no further. He stopped, lean-
ing against a tree for his breathing to ease and his heart to
slow, hearing the sound of the dogs as it faded on and died
away.

In camp that night — they had as guests five of the still
terrified strangers in new hunting coats and boots who had
been lost all day until Sam Fathers went out and got them
—he heard the rest of it: how Lion had stopped and held
the bear a gain but only the one-eyed mule which did not
mind the smell of wild blood would approach and Boon was
riding the mule and Boon had never been known to hit
anything. He shot at the bear five times with Ids pump gun,
touching nothing, and Old Ben killed another hound and
broke free once more and reached the river and was gone*
Again Boon and Lion hunted as far down one bank as they
dared. Too far; they crossed in the first of dusk and dark

218 WILLIAM FAULKNER

overtook them within a mile. And this time Lion found
the broken trail, the blood perhaps, in the darkness where
Old Ben had come up out of the water, but Boon had him
on a rope, luckily, and he got down from the mule and
fought lion hand-to-hand until he got him back to camp.
This time Boon didn’t even curse. He stood in the door,
muddy, spent, his huge gargoyle’s face tragic and still
amazed. “I missed him,” he said. “I was in twenty-five feet
of him and I missed him five times."

"But we have drawn blood," Major de Spain said. “Gen-
eral Compson drew blood. We have never done that be-
fore."

“But I missed him," Boon said. “I missed him five times.
With Lion looking right at me."

“Never mind," Major de Spain said. “It was a damned
fine race. And we drew blood. Next year we’ll let General
Compson or Walter ride Katie, and we’ll get him.”

Then McCaslin said, “Where is Lion, Boon?"

“I left him at Sam’s," Boon said. He was already turning
away. “I aint fit to sleep with him.”

So he should have hated and feared Lion. Yet he did not
It seemed to him that there was a fatality in it It seemed to
him that something, he didn’t know what, was beginning;
had already begun. It was like the last act on a set stage. It
was the beginning of the end of something, he didn’t know
what except that he would not grieve. He would be humble
and proud that he had been found worthy to be a part of
it too or even just to see it too.

3

It was December. It was the coldest December he had
ever remembered. They had been in camp four days

The Bear 219

over two weeks, waiting for the weather to soften so that
Lion and Old Ben could run their yearly race. Then they
would break camp and go home. Because of these unfore-
seen additional days which they had had to pass waiting on
the weather, with nothing to do but play poker, the whisky
had given out and he and Boon were being sent to Memphis
with a suitcase and a note from Major de Spain to Mr
Scznmes, the distiller, to get more. That is. Major de Spain
and McCaslin were sending Boon to get the whisky end
sending him to see that Boon got back with it or most of it
or at least some of it

Tennie’s Jim waked him at three. He dressed rapidly,
shivering, not so much from the cold because a fresh fire
already boomed and roared on the hearth, but in that dead
winter hour when the blood and the heart are slow and
sleep is incomplete. He crossed the gap between house and
kitchen, the gap of iron earth beneath the brilliant and
rigid night where dawn would not begin for three hours
yet, tasting, tongue palate and to the very bottom of his
lungs, the searing dark, and entered the kitchen, the lamp-
lit warmth where the stove glowed, fogging the windows,
and where Boon already sat at the table at breakfast,
hunched over his plate, almost in his plate, his working
jaws bine with stubble and his face innocent of water and
his coarse, horse-mane hair innocent of comb — the
quarter Indian, grandson of a Chickasaw squaw, who on
occasion resented with his hard and furious fists the in*
timation of one single drop of alien blood and on others,
usually after whisky, affirmed with the same fists and the
same fury that his father had been the full-blood Chicka-
saw and even a chief and that even his mother had been
only half white. He was four inches over six feet; he had the
mind of a child, the heart of a horse, and little bard shoe-
button eyes without depth or meanness or generosity or

220 WILLIAM FAULKNER

viciousness or gentleness or anything else, in the ugliest face
the boy had ever seen. It looked like somebody had found
a walnut a little larger than a football and with a machin-
ist’s hammer had shaped features into it and then painted
it, mostly red; not Indian red but a fine bright ruddy color
which whisky might have had something to do with but
which was mostly just happy and violent out-of-doors, the
wrinkles in it not the residue of the forty years it had
survived but from squinting into the sun or into the gloom
of cane-brakes where game had run, baked into it by the
campfires before which he had lain trying to sleep on the
cold November or December ground while waiting for day-
light so he could rise and hunt again, as though time were
merely something he walked through as he did through
air, aging him no more than air did. He was brave, faithful,
improvident and unreliable; he had neither profession job
nor trade and owned one vice and one virtue: whisky, and
that absolute and unquestioning fidelity to Major de Spain
and the boy’s cousin McCaslin. “Sometimes I’d call them
both virtues,” Major de Spain said once. “Or both vices,”
McCaslin said.

He ate his breakfast, hearing the dogs under the kitchen,
wakened by the smell of frying meat or perhaps by the
feet overhead. He heard Lion once, short and peremptory,
as the best hunter in any camp has only to speak once to
all save the fools, and none other of Major de Spain's and
McCaslin’s dogs were Lion’s equal in size and strength and
perhaps even in courage, but they were not fools; Old Ben
had killed the last fool among them last year.

Tennie’s Jim came in as they finished. The wagon was
outside. Ash decided he would drive them over to the log
line where they would flag the outbound log train and let
Tennie’s Jim wash the dishes. The boy knew why. It would
not be the first time he had listened to old Ash badgering
Boon.

The Bear m

It was cold. The wagon wheels banged and clattered on
the frozen ground; the sky was fixed and brilliant. He was
not shivering, he was shaking, slow and steady and hard,
the food he had just eaten still warm and solid inside him
while his outside shook slow and steady around it as though
his stomach floated loose. “They wont run this morning/*
he said. “No dog will have any nose today.”

“Cep Lion,” Ash said, “Lion dont need no nose. All he
need is a bear.” He had wrapped his feet in towsacks and
he had a quilt from his pallet bed on the kitchen floor
drawn over his head and wrapped around him until in
the thin brilliant starlight he looked like nothing at all that
the boy had ever seen before. “He run a bear through a
thousand-acre ice-house. Catch him too. Them other dogs
dont matter because they aint going to keep up with Lion
nohow, long as he got a bear in front of him,”

“What’s wrong with the other dogs?” Boon said. “What
the hell do you know about it anyway? This is the first
time you’ve had your tail out of that kitchen since we got
here except to chop a little wood.”

“Aint nothing wrong with them,” Ash said. “And long
as it’s left up to them, aint nothing going to be. 1 just wish
I had knowed all my life how to take care of my health
good as them hounds knows.”

“Well, they aint going to run this morning,” Boon said.
His voice was harsh and positive. “Major promised they
wouldn’t until me and Ike get back.”

“Weather gonter break today. Gonter soft up. Rain by
night.” Then Ash laughed, chuckled, somewhere inside the
quilt which concealed even his face. “Hum up here,
mules!” he said, jerking the reins so that the mules leaped
forward and snatched the lurching and banging wagon for
several feet before they slowed again into their quick, short*
paced, rapid plodding. “Sides, I like to know why Major
need to wait on you. It’s Lion he aiming to use. I aint never

222 WILLIAM FAULKNER

beard tell of you bringing no bear nor no other kind of
meat into this camp.”

Now Booths going to curse Ash or maybe even hit him ,
the boy thought But Boon never did, never had; die boy
knew he never would even though four yean ago Boon had
•hot five time* with a borrowed pistol at a Negro on the
street In Jefferson, with the same result as when he had
shot five times at Old Ben last faff. “By God,” Boon said,
“he aint going to put Lion or no other dog on nothing until
I get back tonight Because he promised me. Whip up
them mules and keep them whipped up. Do you want mo
to freeze to death?”

They reached the log line and built a fire. After a while
the log train came up out of the woods under the paling
cast and Boon flagged it Then in the warm caboose the
boy slept again while Boon and the conductor and brake-
man talked about lion and Old Ben as people later would
talk about Sullivan and Kilrain and, later still, about Demp-
sey and Tunney. Dozing, swaying as the springless ca-
boose lurched and clattered, he would hear them still talk-
ing, about the shouts and calves Old Ben had killed and
the cribs he had rifled and the traps and deadfalls he had
wrecked and the lead he probably carried under his hide—
Old Ben, the two-toed bear in a land where bears with
trap-ruined feet had been called Two-Toe or Three-Toe or
Cripple-Foot for fifty years, only Old Ben was an extra
bear (the head bear. General Compson called him) and so
had earned a name such as a human man could have worn
and not been sorry.

They reached Hoke’s at sunup. They emerged from the
warm caboose in their hunting clothes, the muddy boots
and stained khaki and Boon’s blue unshaven jowls. But that
was all right Hoke’s was a sawmill and commissary and
two stores and a loading-chute on a sidetrack from the main

The Bear 223

line, and all the men in it wore boots and khaki too. Pres-
ently the Memphis train came. Boon bought three packages
of popcom-and-mol asses and a bottle of beer from the news
butch and the boy went to sleep again to the sound of his
chewing.

But in Memphis it was not all right. It was as if the high
buildings and the hard pavements, the fine carriages and
the horse cars and the men in starched collars and neckties
made their boots and khaki look a little rougher and a little
muddier and made Boon’s beard look worse and more un-
shaven and his face look more and more like he should
never have brought it out of the woods at all or at least out
of reach of Major de Spain or McCaslin or someone who
knew it and could have said, “Dont be afraid. He wont
hurt you,” He walked through the station, on the slick floor,
his face moving as he worked the popcorn out of his teeth
with his tongue, his legs spraddled and stiff in the hips as
if he were walking on buttered glass, and that blue stubblo
on his face like the filings from a new gun-barrel. They
passed the first saloon. Even through the closed doors the
boy could seem to smell the sawdust and the reek of old
drink. Boon began to cough. He coughed for something
less than a minute. “Damn this cold,” he said. “I’d sure
like to know where I got it.”

“Back there in the station,” the boy said.

Boon had started to cough again. He stopped. He looked
at the boy. “What?” he said.

“You never had it when we left camp nor on the train
either.” Boon looked at him, blinking. Then he stopped
blinking. He didn’t cough again. He said quietly:

“Lend me a dollar. Come on. You’ve got it. If you ever
had one, you’ve still got it I dont mean you are tight with
your money because you aint. You just dont never seem
to ever think of nothing you want. When I was sixteen a

224 WILLIAM FAULKNER

dollar bill melted off of me before I even had time to read
die name of the bank that issued it.” He said quietly; “Let
me have a dollar, Ike.”

"You promised Major. You promised McCaslin. Not dll
We get back to camp.”

“All right,” Boon said in that quiet and patient voice.
"What can I do on just one dollar? You aint going to. lend
me another.”

"You’re damn right I aint,” the boy said, his. voice quiet
too, cold with rage which was not at Boon, remembering:
Boon, snoring in a hard chair in the kitchen so he could
watch the clock and wake him and McCaslin and drive
them the seventeen miles in to Jefferson to catch the train
to Memphis; the wild, never-bridled Texas paint pony
which he had persuaded McCaslin to let him .buy -and
which he and Boon had bought at auction for four dollars
and seventy-five cents and fetched home wired between two
gentle old mares with pieces of barbed wire and which had
never even seen shelled com before and didn’t even know
what it was unless the grains were bugs maybe and at last
(he was ten and Boon had been ten all his life) Boon said
the pony was gentled and with a towsack over its head and
lour Negroes to hold it they backed it into an old two-
wheeled cart and hooked up the gear and he and Boon got
up and Boon said, “All right, boys. Let him go,” and one
of the Negroes — it was Tennie’s Jim — snatched the tow-
sack off and leaped for his life and they lost the first wheel
against a post of the open gate only at that moment Boon
caught him by the scruff of the neck and flung him. into the
roadside ditch so he only saw the rest of it in fragments:
the other wheel as it slammed through the side gate and
crossed the backyard and leaped up onto the gallery and
scraps of the cart here and there along the road and Boon
vanishing rapidly on his stomach in the leaping and spurt*

The Bear 225

in g dost and still holding the reins until they broke too and
two days later they finally caught the pony seven miles
away still wearing the hames and the headstall of the
bridle around its neck like a duchess with two necklaces at
one time. He gave Boon the dollar.

“All right” Boon said “Come on in out of the cold.”

“I aint cold,” he said*

“You can have some lemonade*”

“I dont want any lemonade.”

The door closed behind him. The sun was well up now.
It was a brilliant day, though Ash had said it would rain
before night. Already it was warmer; they could run to-
morrow. He felt the old lift of the heart, as pristine as ever,
as on the first day; he would never lose it, no matter how
old in hunting and pursuit: the best, the best of all breath-
ing, the humility and the pride. He must stop thinking
about it Already it seemed to him that he was running,
back to the station, to the tracks themselves: the first train
going south; he must stop thinking about it The street was
busy. He watched the big Norman draft horses, the Per-
cherons; the trim carriages from which the men in the fine
overcoats and the ladies rosy in furs descended and entered
the station. (They were still next door to it but one.)
Twenty years ago his father had ridden into Memphis as
a member of Colonel Sartoris* horse in Forrest’s command,
up Main Street and (the tale told) into the lobby of the
Gayoso Hotel where the Yankee officers sat in the leather
chairs spitting into the tall bright cuspidors and then out
again, scot-fre e — -

The door opened behind him. Boon was wiping his
mouth on the back of his hand. “All right,” he said. “Left
go tend to it and get the hell out of here.”

They went and had the suitcase packed. He never knew
where or when Boon got the other bottle. Doubtless Mr.

22 6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Semmes gave it to him. When they reached Hoke’s again
at sundown, it was. empty. They could get a return train
to Hoke’s in two hours; they went straight back to the
station as Major de Spain and then McCaslin had told
Boon to do and then ordered him to do and had sent die
boy along to see that he did. Booh took the first drink from
his bottle in the washroom. A man in a uniform cap came
to tell him he couldn’t drink, there and looked at Boon’s
face once and said nothing. The next time he was pouring
into his water glass beneath the edge of a table in the
restaurant when the manager (she was a woman) did tell
him he couldn’t drink there and he went back to the wash-
room. He had been telling the Negro waiter and all the
other people in the restaurant who couldn’t help but hear
him and who had never heard of Lion and didn’t want to,
about Lion and Old Ben. Then he happened to think of
the zoo. He had found out that there was another train to
Hoke’s at three oclock and so they would spend the time
at the zoo and take the three oclock train until he came
back from the. washroom for the third time. Then they
would take the first train back to camp, get Lion and come
back to the zoo where, he said, the bears were fed on ice
cream and ladylingers and he would match Lion against
them all.

So they missed the first train, the one-they were supposed
to take, but he got Boon onto the three oclock train and
they were all right again, with Boon not even going to the
washroom now but drinking in the aisle and talking about
lion and the men he buttonholed no more daring to tell
Boon he couldn’t drink there than the man in the station
had dared.

When they reached Hoke’s at sundown, Boon was asleep.
The boy waked him at last and got him and the suitcase
off the train and he even persuaded him to eat some supper

The Bear 227

at the sawmill commissary. So he was all right when they
got in the caboose of the log train to go back into the
woods, with the sun going down red and the sky already
overcast and the ground would not freeze tonight It was
the boy who slept now, sitting behind the ruby stove while
the springless caboose jumped and clattered and Boon and
the brakeman and the conductor talked about lion and Old
Ben because they knew what Boon was talking about be*
cause this was home. “Overcast and already thawing,” Boon
said. “Lion will get him tomorrow.”

It would have to be Lion, or somebody. It would not be
Boon. He had never hit anything bigger than a squirrel
that anybody ever knew, except the Negro woman that day
when he was shooting at the Negro man. He was a big
Negro and not ten feet away but Boon shot five times with
tho pistol he had borrowed from Major de Spain’s Negro
coachman and the Negro he was shooting at outed with a
dollar-and-a-half mail-order pistol and would have burned
Boon down with it only it never went off, it just went
snicksnkksnicksniclcsnick five times and Boon still blasting
away and he broke a plate-glass window that cost McCaslin
forty-five dollars and hit a Negro woman who happened to
be passing in the leg only Major de Spain paid for that; ho
and McCaslin cut cards, the plate-glass window against
the Negro woman’s leg. And the first day on stand this year,
the first morning in camp, the buck ran right over Boon; ho
heard Boon’s old pump gun go whow. whow. whow. whow*
whow. and then his voice: “God damn, here he comes!
Head himl Head himl” and when he got there the buck’s
track and the five exploded shells were not twenty paces
apart

There were five guests in camp that night from Jeffer-
son: Mr Bayard Sartoris and his son and General Comp*
son’s son and two others. And the next morning he looked

228 WILLIAM FAULKNER

out the window, into the gray thin drizzle of daybreak
which Ash had predicted, and there they were, standing
and squatting beneath the thin rain, almost two dozen of
them who had fed Old Ben com and shoats and even
calves for ten years, in their worn hats and hunting coats
and overalls which any town Negro would have thrown
away or burned and only the rubber boots strong and
sound, and the worn and blueless guns and some even
without guns. While they ate breakfast a dozen more
arrived, mounted and on foot: loggers from the camp thir-
teen miles below and sawmill men from Hoke’s and die
only gun among them that one which the log-train con-
ductor carried: so that when they went Into the woods this
morning Major de Spain led a party almost as strong, ex-
cepting that some of them were not armed, as some he had
led in the last darkening days of ’64 and ’65. The little yard
would not hold them. They overflowed it, into the lane
where Major de Spain sat his mare while Ash in his dirty
apron thrust the greasy cartridges into his carbine and
passed it up to him and the great grave blue dog stood at
his stirrup not as a dog stands but as a horse stands, blink-
ing his sleepy topaz eyes at nothing, deaf even to the yelling
of the hounds which Boon and Tennie’s Jim held on leash*

“We’ll put General Compson on Katie this morning,”
Major de Spain said. “He drew blood last year; if he’d had
a mule then that would have stood, he would have — w

“No,” General Compson said. “I’m too old to go helling
through the woods on a mule or a horse or anything else
any more. Besides, I had my chance last year and missed it
I’m going on a stand this morning. Fm going to let that
boy ride Katie.”

“No, wait,” McCaslin said. “Ike’s got the rest of his life
to hunt bears in. Let somebody else — — ”

“No,” General Compson said. “I want Ike to ride Katie.

The Bear 229

He’s already a better woodsman than you or'me either and
in another ten years hell be as good as Walter.”

At first he couldn’t believe it, not until Major de Spain
spoke to him. Then he was up, on the one-eyed mule which
would not spook at wild blood, looking down at the dog
motionless at Major de Spain’s stirrup, looking in the gray
streaming light bigger than a calf, bigger than he knew it
actually was — the big head, the chest almost as big as his
own, the blue hide beneath which the muscles flinched or
quivered to no touch since the heart which drove blood to
them loved no man and no thing, standing as a horse stands
yet different from a horse which implies only weight and
speed while Lion implied not only courage and all else that
went to make up the will and desire to pursue and kill, but
endurance, the will and desire to endure beyond all imag-
inable limits of flesh in order to overtake and slay. Then
the dog looked at him. It moved its head and looked at him
across the trivial uproar of the hounds, out of the yellow
eyes as depthless as Boon’s, as free as Boon’s of meanness
or generosity or gentleness or viciousness. They were just
cold and sleepy. Then it blinked, and he knew it was not
looking at him and never had been, without even bothering
to turn its head away.

That morning he heard the first cry. lion had already
vanished while Sam and Tennie’s Jim were putting saddles
on the mule and horse which had drawn the wagon and he
watched the hounds as they crossed and cast, snuffing and
whimpering, until they too disappeared. Then he and
Major de Spain and Sam and Tennie’s Jim rode after them
and heard the first cry out of the wet and thawing woods
not two hundred yards ahead, high, with that abject, almost
human quality he had come to know, and the other hounds
joining in until the gloomed woods rang and clamored.
They rode then. It seemed to him that he could actually

230 WILLIAM FAULKNER

see the big blue dog boring on, silent, and the bear too:
the thick, locomotive-like shape which he had seen that
day four years ago crossing the blow-down, crashing on
ahead of die dogs faster than he had believed it could have
moved, drawing away even from the running mules. He
heard a shotgun, once. The woods had opened, they were
going fast, the clamor faint and fading on ahead; they
passed the man who had fired — a swamper, a pointing arm,
a gaunt face, the small black orifice of his yelling studded
with rotten teeth.

He heard the changed note in the hounds* uproar and
two hundred yards ahead he saw them. The bear bad
turned. He saw Lion drive in without pausing and saw the
bear strike him aside and lunge into the yelling hounds
and kill one of them almost in its tracks and whirl and run
again. Then they were in a streaming fide of dogs. He
heard Major de Spain and Tennie*s Jim shouting and the
pistol sound of Tennie’s Jim’s leather thong as he tried to
turn them. Then he and Sam Fathers were riding alone.
One of the hounds had kept on with Lion though* He
recognised its voice. It was the young hound which even a
year ago had had no judgment and which, by the lights
of the other hounds anyway, still had none. Maybe thafs
what courage is, he thought “Right,” Sam said behind him.
“Right We got to turn him from the river if we can.”

Now they were in cane: a brake. He knew the path
through it as well as Sam did. They came out of the un-
dergrowth and struck the entrance almost exactly. It would
traverse the brake and come out onto a high open ridge
above the river. He heard die fiat clap of Walter Ewell’s
rifle, then two mote. “No,” Sam said. ‘T can hear the
hound. Go on.”

They emerged from the narrow roofless tunnel of snap-
ping and hissing cane, still galloping, onto the open ridge
below which the thick yellow river, reflectionless in the

The Bear 231

gray and streaming light, seemed not to move. Now he
could hear the hound too. It was not running. The cry
was a high frantic yapping and Boon was running along
the edge of the bluff, his old gun leaping and jouncing
against his back on its sling made of a piece of cotton plow*
line. He whirled and ran up to them, wild-faced, and flung
himself onto the mule behind the boy. “That damn boat!**
he cried. “It’s on the other side! He went straight across!
lion was too close to him! That little hound too! Lion was
so close I couldn’t shoot! Go on!” he cried, beating his
heels into the mule’s flanks. “Go on!”

They plunged down the bank, slipping and sliding in
the thawed earth, crashing through the willows and into
the water. He felt no shock, no cold, he on one side of the
swimming mule, grasping the pommel with one hand and
holding his gun above the water with the other. Boon op-
posite him. Sam was behind them somewhere, and then the
river, the water about them, was full of dogs. They swam
faster than the mules; they were scrabbling up the bank
before the mules touched bottom. Major do Spain was
whooping from the bank they had just left and, looking
back, he saw Tennie’s Jim and the horse as they went into
the water.

Now the woods ahead of them and the rain-heavy air
were one uproar. It rang .and clamored; it echoed and
broke against the bank behind them and reformed and
clamored and rang until it seemed to the boy that all the
hounds which had ever bayed game in this land were yell-
ing down at him. He got his leg over the mule as it came up
out of the water. Boon didn’t try to mount again. He
grasped one stirrup as they went up the bank and crashed
through the undergrowth which fringed the bluff and saw
the bear, on its hind feet, its back against a tree while the
bellowing bounds swirled around it and once more Lion
drove in, leaping clear of the ground.

232 WILLIAM FAULKNER

This time the bear didn’t strike him down. It caught the
dog in both arms, almost loverlike, and they both went
down. He was off the mule now. He drew back both
hammers of the gun but he could see nothing but moiling
spotted houndbodies until the bear surged up again. Boon
was yelling something, he could not tell what; he could see
Lion still clinging to the bear’s throat and he saw the bear,
half erect, strike one of the hounds with one paw and hurl
it five or six feet and then, rising and rising as though it
would never stop, stand erect again and begin to rake at
Lion’s belly with its forepaws. Then Boon was running.
The boy saw the gleam of the blade in his hand and
watched him leap among the hounds, hurdling them, kick-
ing them aside as he ran, and fling himself astride the bear
as he had hurled himself onto the mule, his legs locked
around the bear’s belly, his left arm under the bear’s throat
Where Lion clung, and the glint of the knife as it rose
and fell.

It fell just once. For an instant they almost resembled a
piece of statuary: the clinging dog, the bear, the man astride
its back, working and probing the buried blade. Then they
went down, pulled over backward by Boon’s weight. Boon
underneath. It was the bear’s back which reappeared first
but at once Boon was astride it again. He had never re-
leased the knife and again the boy saw the almost in-
finitesimal movement of his arm and shoulder as he probed
and sought; then the bear surged erect, raising with it the
man and the dog too, and turned and still carrying the
man and the dog it took two or three steps toward the
woods on its hind feet as a man would have walked and
crashed down. It didn’t collapse, crumple. It fell all of a
piece, as a tree falls, so that all three of them, man dog and
bear, seemed to bounce once.

He and Tennie’s Jim ran forward. Boon was kneeling at
die bear’s head. His left ear was shredded, his left coat

The Bear 233

sleeve was completely gone, his right boot had been zipped
from knee to instep; the bright blood thinned in the thin
rain down his leg and hand and arm and down the side
of his face which was no longer wild bat was quite calm.
Together they prized Lion’s jaws from the bear’s throat.
“Easy, goddamn it,” Boon said. “Cant you see his guts are
all out of him?” He began to remove his coat He spoke to
Tennie’s Jim in that calm voice: “Bring the boat up. Ifs
about a hundred yards down the bank there. I saw it”
Tennie’s Jim rose and went away. Then, and he could not
remember if it had been a call or an exclamation from
Tennie’s Jim or if he had glanced up by chance, he saw
Tennie’s Jim stooping and saw Sam Fathers lying motion-
less on his face in the trampled mud.

The mule had not thrown him. He remembered that
Sam was down too even before Boon began to run. There
was no mark on him whatever and when he and Boon
turned him over, his eyes were open and he said something
in that tongue which he and Joe Baker had used to speak
together. But he couldn’t move. Tennie’s Jim brought the
skiff up; they could hear him shouting to Major de Spain
across the river. Boon wrapped Lion in his hunting coat
and carried him down to the skid and they carried Sam
down and returned and hitched the bear to the one-eyed
mule’s saddle-bow with Tennie’s Jim’s leash-thong and
dragged him down to the skiff and got him into it and left
Tennie’s Jim to swim the horse and the two mules back
across. Major de Spain caught the bow of the skiff as Boon
jumped out and past him before it touched die bank. Ho
looked at Old Ben and said quietly: “Well.” Then be
walked into the water and leaned down and touched Sam
and Sam looked up at him and said something in that old
tongue he and Joe Baker spoke. “You dont know what
happened?” Major de Spain said.

“No, sir,” the boy said. “It wasn’t the mule. It wasn’t

234 WILLIAM FAULKNER

anything. He was off the mule when Boon ran in on the
bear. Then we looked up and he was lying on the ground.*
Boon was shouting at Tennie’s Jim, still in the middle of
the river.

"Come on, goddamn hi” he said. “Bring me that mule!*

“What do you want with a mule?* Major de Spain said.

Boon didn’t even look at him. Tm going to Hoke’s to
get the doctor,” he said in that calm voice, his face quite
c alm beneath die steady thinning of the bright blood.

“You need a doctor yourself,” Major de Spain said.
“Tennie’s Jim ”

“Damn that,” Boon said. He turned on Major de Spain.
His face was still calm, only his voice was a pitch higher.
“Cant you see his goddamn guts are all out of him?”

“Boon!” Major de Spain said. They looked at one an-
other. Boon was a good head taller than Major de Spain;
even the boy was taller now than Major de Spain.

“Pve got to get the doctor,” Boon said. “His goddamn
guts ”

“All right,” Major de Spain said. Tennie’s Jim came up
out of the water. The horse and the sound mule had al-
ready scented Old Ben; they surged and plunged all the
way up to the top of the bluff, dragging Tesmie’s Jim
with them, before he could stop them and tie them and
come back. Major de Spain unlooped the leather thong of
his compass from his buttonhole and gave it to Tennie’s
Jim. “Go straight to Hoke’s,” he said. “Bring Doctor Craw-
ford back with you. Tell him there are two men to be
looked at Take my mare. Can yon find die road from
here?”

“Yes, sir,” Tennie’s Jim.said*

“AD right,* Major de Spain said. “Go on.” He turned
to the boy. “Take the mules and the horse and go back and
get the wagon. We’ll go on down the river in the boat to
Coon Bridge. Meet us there. Can you find it again?”

The Bear 235

“Yes, sir,” the boy said.

“All right Get started.”

He went back to the wagon. He realised then how far
they had am. It was already afternoon when he pat the
males into the traces and tied the horse's lead-rope to the
tail-gate. He reached Coon Bridge at dusk. The skiff was
already there. Before he could see it and almost before ho
could see the water he had to leap from the tilting wagon,
still holding the reins, and work around to where he could
grasp the bit and then the ear of the plunging sound mule
and dig his heels and hold it until Boon came up the bank.
The rope of the led horse had already snapped and it had
already disappeared up the road toward camp. They turned
the wagon around and took the mules out and he led the
sound mule a hundred yards up the road and tied it. Boon
had already brought Lion up to the wagon and Sam was
sitting up in the skiff now and when they raised him he
tried to walk; up the bank and to the wagon and he tried
to climb into the wagon but Boon did not wait; he picked
Sam up bodily and set him on the seat Then they hitched
Old Ben to the one-eyed mule's saddle again and dragged
him up the bank and set two skid-poles into the open tail-
gate and got him into the wagon and he went and got the
sound mule and Boon fought it into the traces, striking it
across its hard hollow-sounding face until it came into
position and stood trembling. Then the rain came down, as
though it had held off all day waiting on them.

They returned to camp through it, through the stream-
ing and rightless dark, hearing long before they saw any
light the horn and the spaced shots to guide them. When
they came to Sam's dark little hut he tried to stand up. Ho
spoke again in the tongue of the old fathers; then he said
clearly: “Let me out Let me out”

“He hasn't got any fire,” Major said. “Go on!” he said
sharply

2$6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

But Sam was struggling now, trying to stand up. “Let mo
out, master,” he said. “Let me go home.”

So he stopped the wagon and Boon got down and lifted
Sam out He did not wait to let Sam try to walk this time.
He carried him into the hut and Major de Spain got light
on a paper spill from the buried embers on the hearth and
lit the lamp and Boon put Sam on his bunk and drew off
his boots and Major de Spain covered him and the boy was
not there, he was holding the mules, the sound one which
was trying again to bolt since when the wagon stopped Old
Ben's scent drifted forward again along the streaming black*
ness of air, but Sam’s eyes were probably open again on
that profound look which saw further than them or the
hut, further than the death of a bear and the dying of a
dog. Then they went on, toward the long wailing of the
horn and the shots which seemed each to linger intact
somewhere in the thick streaming air until the next spaced
report joined and blended with it, to the lighted house, the
bright streaming windows, the quiet faces as Boon entered,
bloody and quite calm, carrying the bundled coat. He laid
Lion, blood coat and all, on his stale sheetless pallet bed
which not even Ash, as deft in the house as a woman, could
ever make smooth.

The sawmill doctor from Hoke’s was already there. Boon
would not let the doctor touch him until he had seen to
Lion. He wouldn’t risk giving Lion chloroform. He put the
entrails back and sewed him up without it while Major de
Spain held his head and Boon his feet. But he never tried
to. move. He lay there, the yellow eyes open upon nothing
while the quiet men in the new hunting clothes and in the
old ones crowded into the little airless room rank with the
smell of Boon’s body and garments, and watched. Then
the doctor cleaned and disinfected Boon’s face and arm and
leg and bandaged them and, the boy in front with a lantern

The Bear 237

and die doctor and McCaslin and Major de Spain and
Genera] Compson following, they went to Sam Fathers*
hut Tennie’s Jim had built up the fire; he squatted before
it, dozing. Sam had not moved since Boon had put him
in die bunk and Major de Spain had covered him with the
blankets, yet he opened his eyes and looked from one to
another of the faces and when McCaslin touched his shoul-
der and said, “Sam* The doctor wants to look at you,** he
even drew his hands out of the blanket and began to
fumble at his shirt buttons until McCaslin said, “Wait*
We’ll do it” They undressed him* He lay there— the
copper-brown, almost hairless body, the old man’s body,
the old man, the wild man not even one generation from
the woods, childless, kinless, peopleless — motionless, his
eyes open but no longer looking at any of them, while the
doctor examined him and drew the blankets up and put
the stethoscope back into his bag and snapped the bag and
only the boy knew that Sam too was going to die*

“Exhaustion,” the doctor said* “Shock maybe. A man his
age swimming rivers in December* He’ll to all right. Just
make him stay in bed for a day or two* Will there to some-
body here with him?”

“There will be somebody here,” Major de Spain said*

They went back to the house, to the rank little room
where Boon still sat on the pallet bed with Lion’s head
under his hand while the men, the ones who had hunted
behind Lion and the ones who had never seen him before
today, came quietly in to look at him and went away* Then
It was dawn and they all went cut into die yard to look at
Old Ben, with his eyes open too and his lips snarled back
from his worn teeth and his mutilated foot and the little
hard lumps under his skin which were the old bullets
(there were fifty-two of them, buckshot rifle and ball) and
the almost invisible slit under his left shoulder where

238 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Boon’s blade had finally found his life. Then Ash began to
beat on the bottom of the dishpan with a heavy spoon to
call them to breakfast and it was the first time he could
remember hearing no sound from the dogs under the
kitchen while they were eating. It was as if the old bear*
even dead there in the yard, was a more potent terror still
than they could face without Lion between them.

The rain had stopped during the night By midraoming
the thin sun appeared, rapidly burning away mist and
cloud, wanning the air and the earth; it would be one of
those windless Mississippi December days which are a sort
of Indian summer's Indian summer. They moved Lion out
to the front gallery, into the sun. It was Boon’s idea. “God-
damn it,* he said, “he never did want to stay in the house
until I made him. You know that* He took a crowbar
and loosened the floor boards under his pallet bed so it
could be raised, mattress and all, without disturbing Lion’s
position, and they carried him out to the gallery and put
him down facing the woods.

Then he and the doctor and McCaslin and Major de
Spain went to Sam’s hut This time Sam didn’t open his
eyes and his breathing was so quiet, so peaceful that they
could hardly see that he breathed. The doctor didn’t even
take out his stethoscope nor even touch him . “He’s all
right,” the doctor said* “He didn’t even catch cold. He just
quit”

“Quit?” McCaslin said*

“Yes. Old people do that sometimes. Then they get a
goodnight’s sleep or maybe it’s just a drink of whisky, and
they change their minds.”

They returned to the house. And then they began to
arrive~-the swamp-dwellers, the gaunt men who ran trap*
fines and lived on quinine and coons and river water, die
fanners of little com- and cotton-patches along the bottom’s

The Bear 239

edge whose fields and cribs and pig-pens the old bear had
rifled, the loggers from the camp and the sawmill men
from Hoke’s and the town men from farther away than
that, whose hounds die old bear had slain and traps and
deadfalls he had wrecked and whose lead he carded They
came up mounted and on foot and In wagons, to enter the
yard and look at him and then go on to the front where
Lion lay, filling die little yard and overflowing it until
there were almost a hundred of them squatting and stand*
ing in the warm and drowsing sunlight, talking quietly of
hunting, of the game and the dogs which ran it, of hounds
and bear and deer and men of yesterday vanished from the
earth, while from time to time the great blue dog would
open his eyes, not as if he were listening to them but as
though to look at the woods for a moment before closing
his eyes again, to remember the woods or to see that they
were still there. He died at sundown.

Major de Spain broke camp that night. They carried
lion into the woods, or Boon carried him that is, wrapped
ina quilt from his bed, just as he had refused to let anyone
else touch lion yesterday until the doctor got there; Boon
carrying lion, and the boy and General Compson and
Walter and still almost fifty of them following with lanterns
and lighted pine-knots — men from Hoke’s and even fum
ther, who would have to ride out of the bottom in the dark,
and swampers and trappers who would have to walk even,
scattering toward the little hidden huts where they lived.
And Boon would let nobody else dig the grave either and
lay lion in it and cover him and then General Compson
stood at the head of it while the blaze and smoke of the
pine-knots streamed away among the winter branches and
spoke as he would have spoken over a man. Then they re*
turned to camp. Major de Spain and McGasHn and Ash
had rolled and tied all the bedding. The mules were

240 WILLIAM FAULKNER

hitched to the wagon and pointed out of the bottom and
the wagon was already loaded and die stove in the kitchen
was cold and the table was set with scraps of cold food and
bread and only the coffee was hot when the boy ran into
the kitchen where Major de Spain and McCaslin had ah*
ready eaten. “What?” he cried. “What? Fm not going.**

Wes,” McCaslin said, “we’re going out tonight Major
wants to get on back home.”

“No!” he said. *Tm going to stay.”

“You’ve got to be back in school Monday. You’ve al-
ready missed a week more than I intended. It will take
you from now until Monday to catch up. Sam’s all right
Yon heard Doctor Crawford. Tm going to leave' Boon and
Tennis’s Jim both to stay with him until he feels like
getting up.”

He was panting. The others had come in. He looked
rapidly and almost frantically around at the other faces.
Boon had a fresh bottle. He upended it and started the cork
by striking tho bottom of the bottle with the heel of his
hand and drew the cork with his teeth and spat it out and
drank. "You’re damn right you’re going back to school,”
Boon said. “Or FU bum the tail off of you myself if Cass
dont, whether you are sixteen or sixty. Where in hell do
you expect to get without education? Where would Cass
be? Where in hell would I be if I hadn’t never went to
school?”

He looked at McCaslin again. He could feel his breath
coming shorter and shorter and shallower and shallower,
as if there were not enough air in the kitchen for that
many to breathe. “This is just Thursday. I’ll come home
Sunday night on one of the horses. I’ll come home Sunday,
then. FU make up the time 1 lost studying Sunday night,
McCaslin,” he said, without even despair.

The Bear 241

“No, I tell you,” McCaslin said. “Sit down here and eat
your supper. We’re going out to ”

“Hold up, Cass,” General Corapson said. The boy did
not know General Compson had moved until he put his
hand on his shoulder. “What is it, bud?” he said.

“I've got to stay,” he said. “I’ve got to.”

“AH right,” General Compson said. “You can stay. If
missing an extra week of school is going to throw you so far
behind you’ll have to sweat to find out what some hired
pedagogue put between the covers of a book, you better
quit altogether. — And you shut up, Cass,” he said, though
McCaslin had not spoken. “You’ve got one foot straddled
Into a farm and the other foot straddled into a bank; you
aint even got a good hand-hold where this boy was already
an old man long before you damned Sartorises and Ed-
mondses invented farms and banks to keep yourselves from
having to find out what this boy was bora knowing and
fearing too maybe but without being afraid, that could go
ten miles on a compass because he wanted to look at a bear
none of us had ever got near enough to put a bullet in and
looked at the bear and came the ten miles back on the
compass in the dark; maybe by God that’s the why and the
wherefore of farms and banks. — I reckon you still aint go-
ing to tel! what it is?”

But still he could not “I’ve got to stay,” he said

“All right” General Compson said. “There’s plenty of
grub left And you’ll come home Sunday, like you prom-
ised McCaslin? Not Sunday night: Sunday.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“All right” General Compson said “Sit down and eat,
boys,” he said “Let’s get started It’s going to be cold be-
fore we get home.”

They ate. The wagon was already loaded and ready to
depart; all they had to do was to get into it Boon would

242 WILLIAM FAULKNER

drive them out to the road, to the farmer’s stable where the
surrey had been lefL He stood beside the wagon, in sil-
houette on the sky, iurbaned like a Paytkan and taller than
any there, the bottle tilted. Then he flung the bottle from
his lips without even lowering it, spinning and glinting in
the faint starlight, empty. “Them that’s going,” he said,
“gat in the goddamn wagon. Them that aint, get out of
the goddamn way.” The others got in. Boon mounted to the
scat beside General Compson and the wagon moved, on
into the obscurity until the boy could no longer see it, even
the moving density of it amid the greater night. But he
could still hear it, for a long while: the slow, deliberate
banging of the wooden frame as it lurched from rut to rut.
And he could hear Boon even when he could no longer
hear the wagon. He was singing, harsh, tuneless, loud.

That was Thursday. On Saturday morning Tennie’s
Jim left on McCaslin’s woods-horse which had not been
out of the bottom one time now in six years, and late that
afternoon rode through the gate on the spent horse and on
to the commissary where McCaslin was rationing the ten-
ants and the wage-hands for the coining week, and this time
McCaslin forestalled any necessity or risk of having to wait
while Major de Spain s surrey was being horsed and har-
ness ed. He took their own, and with Tennie’s Jim already
asleep in the back seat he drove in to Jefferson and waited
while Major de Spain changed to boots and put on his
overcoat, and they drove the thirty miles in the dark of
that nigjht and at daybreak on Sunday morning they
swapped to the waiting mare and mule and as the sun rose
they rode out of the jungle and onto the low ridge where
they had buried Lion: the low mound of unannealed
earth where Boon’s spade-marks still showed and beyond
the grave the platform of freshly cut saplings bound be-
tween four posts and the blanket-wrapped bundle upon the

The Bear 243

platform and Boon and the boy squatting between the
platform and the grave until Boon, the bandage removed,
lipped, from his head so that the long scori&tions of Old
Ben’s claws resembled crusted tar in the sunlight, sprang
up and threw down upon them with the old gun with
which he had never been known to hit anything although
McCaslin was already off the mule, kicked both feet free
of the irons and vaulted down before the mule had stopped,
walking toward Boon.

“Stand back,” Boon said. ‘By God, you wont touch him.
Stand back, McCaslin.” Still McCaslin came on, fast yet
without haste.

“Cass!” Major de Spain said. Then he said “BoonI You,
Boon!” and he was down too and the boy rose too, quickly,
and still McCaslin came on not fast but steady and walked
up to the grave and reached his hand steadily out, quickly
yet still not fast, and took hold of the gun by the middle so
that he and Boon faced one another across lion’s grave,
both holding the gun. Boon’s spent indomitable amazed
and frantic face almost a head higher than McCaslin’s
beneath the black scoriations of beast’s claws and then
Boon’s chest began to heave as though there were not
enough air in all the woods, in all the wilderness, for all
of them, for him and anyone else, even for him alone.

“Turn it loose. Boon,” McCaslin said.

“You damn little spindling — ” Boon said. “Dont you
know I can take it away from you? Dont you know I can
tie it around your neck like a damn cravat?”

“Y es,” McCaslin said. “Turn it loose, Boon.”

“This is the way he wanted it He told us. He told us
exactly how to do it And by God you aint going to move
him. So we did it like he said, and I been sitting here ever
since to keep the damn wildcats and varmints away from
him and by God — ” Then McCaslin had the gun, down*

244 WILLIAM FAULKNER

slanted while he pumped the slide, the five shells gtifalrfog
out of it so fast that the last one was almost out before the
first one touched the ground and McCaslin dropped the
gun behind him without once having taken bis eyes from
Boon’s.

“Did you loll him, Boon?” he said. Then Boon moved.
He -turned, he moved like he was still drunk and then
for a moment blind too, one hand out as he blundered to-
ward the big tree and seemed to stop walking before he
reached the tree so that he plunged, fell toward it, fling-
ing up both hands and catching himself against the tree and
turning until his back was against it, backing with the tree’s
trunk his wild spent scoriated face and the tremendous
heave and collapse of his chest, McCaslin following, facing
him again, never once having moved his eyes from Boon’s
eyes. “Did you kill him. Boon?”

“Tell the truth,” McCaslin said. “I would have done it
if he had asked me to.” Then the boy moved. He was be-
tween them, facing McCaslin; the water felt as if it had
burst and sprung not from his eyes alone but from his
whole face, like sweat

“Leave him alonel” he cried. “Goddamn it! Leave him
alonel”

4

then he was twenty-one. He could say it, himself and his
cousin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the
tamed land which was to have been his heritage, the land
which old Carothers McCaslin his grandfather had bought
with white man’s money from the wild men whose grand-
fathers without guns hunted it, and tamed and ordered or
believed he had tamed and ordered it for the reason that

The Bear 245

the human beings he held in bondage and in the power
of life and death had removed the forest from it and in
their sweat scratched the surface of it to a depth of perhaps
fourteen inches in order to grow something out of it which
had not been there before and which could be translated
back into the money he who believed he had bought it had
had to pay to get it and hold it and a reasonable profit too:
and for which reason old Carothers McCaslin, knowing
better, could raise his children, his descendants and heirs,
to believe the land was his to hold and bequeath since the
strong and ruthless man has a cynical foreknowledge of his
own vanity and pride and strength and a contempt for all
his get: just as, knowing better. Major de Spain and his
fragment of that wilderness which was bigger and older
than any recorded deed: just as, knowing better, old
Thomas Sutpen, from whom Major de Spain had had his
fragment for money: just as Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw
chief, from whom Thomas Sutpen had had the fragment
for money or rum or whatever it was, knew in his turn
that not even a fragment of it had been his to relinquish or
sell

not against the wilderness but against the land, not in
pursuit and lust but in relinquishment, and in the commis-
sary as it should have been, not the heart perhaps but
certainly the solar-plexus of the repudiated and relin-
quished: the square, galleried, wooden building squatting
like a portent above the fields whose laborers it still held in
thrall *65 or no and placarded over with advertisements
for snuff and cures for chills and salves and potions manu-
factured and sold by white men to bleach the pigment and
straighten the hair of Negroes that they might resemble the
very race which for two hundred years had held them in
bondage and from which for another hundred years not
even a bloody civil war would have set them completely free

246 WILLIAM FAULKNER

himself and his cousin amid the old smells of cheese and
salt meat and kerosene and harness, the ranked shelves of
tobacco and overalls and bottled medicine and thread and
plow-bolts, the barrels and kegs of hour and meal and mo-
lasses and nails, the wall pegs dependant with plowlines
and plow-collars and hames and trace-chains, and the desk
and the shelf above it on which rested the ledgers in which
McCaslin recorded the slow outward trickle of food and
supplies and equipment which returned each fall as cotton
made and ginned and sold (two threads frail as truth and
impalpable as equators yet cable-strong to bind for life
them who made the cotton to the land their sweat fell on) f
and the older ledgers clumsy and archaic in size and shape,
on the yellowed pages of which were recorded in the faded
hand of his father Theophilus and his uncle Amodeus dur-
ing the two decades before the Civil War, the manumis-
sion in title at least of Carothers McCaslin’s slaves:

‘Relinquish/ McCaslin said. ‘Relinquish. You, the direct
male descendant of him who saw the opportunity and took
it, bought the land, took the land, got the land no matter
how, held it to bequeath, no matter how, out of the old
grant, the first patent, when it was a wilderness of wild
beasts and wilder men, and cleared it, translated it into
something to bequeath to his children, worthy of bequeath-
meat for his descendants’ ease and security and pride and
to perpetuate his name and accomplishments. Not only the
male descendant but the only and last descendant in the
male line and in the third generation, while I am not only
four generations from old Carothers, I derived through a
woman and the very McCaslin in my name is mine only by
sufferance and courtesy and my grandmother’s pride in
what that man accomplished whose legacy and monument
you think you can repudiate.* and he

1 cant repudiate it It was never mine to repudiate. It

The Bear 247

was never Father’s and Uncle Buddy’s to bequeath me to
repudiate because it was never Grandfather s to bequeath
them to bequeath me to repudiate because it was never old
Ikkemotubbe’s to sell to Grandfather for bequeathment and
repudiation. Because it was never Ikkemotubbe’s fathers*
fathers’ to bequeath Ikkemotubbe to sell to Grandfather or
any man because on the instant when Ikkemotubbe dis-
covered, realised, that he could sell it for money, on that
instant it ceased ever to have been his forever, father to
father to father, and the man who bought it bought
nothing.’

‘Bought nothing?’ and he

‘Bought nothing. Because He told in the Book how He
created the earth, made it and looked at it and said it was
all right, and then He made man. He made the earth first
and peopled it with dumb creatures, and then He created
man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty
over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to
hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title for-
ever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares
of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in
the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee
He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and en-
durance and the sweat of his face for bread. And 1 know
what you axe going to say,’ he said: ‘That nevertheless
Grandfather — ’ and McCaslin

‘—did own it And not the first Not alone and not the
first since, as your Authority states, man was dispossessed of
Eden. Nor yet the second and still not alone, on down
through the tedious and shabby chronicle of His chosen
sprung from Abraham, and of the sons of them who dis-
possessed Abraham, and of the five hundred years during
which half the known world and all it contained was chattel
to one city as this plantation and all the life it contained

248 WILLIAM FAULKNER.

was chattel and revokeless thrall to this commissary store
and those ledgers yonder daring your grandfather’s life,
and the next thousand years while men fought over the
fragments of that collapse until at last even the fragments
were exhausted and men snarled over die gnawed bones of
the old world’s worthless evening until an accidental egg
discovered to them a new hemisphere. So let me say it:
That nevertheless and notwithstanding old Carothers did
own it Bought it, got it, no matter; kept it, held h, no mat-
ter; bequeathed it; else why do you stand here relinquish-
ing and repudiating? Held it, kept it for fifty years until
you could repudiate it, while He — this Arbiter, this Archi-
tect this Umpire — condoned — or did He? looked down
and saw — or did He? Or at least did nothing; saw, and
could not or did not see; saw, and would not or perhaps
He would not see — perverse, impotent or blind: which?*
and he

•Dispossessed.’ and McCaslin

*WhatT and he

•Dispossessed. Not impotent: He didn’t condone; not
blind, because He watched it And let me say it Dispos-
sessed of Eden. Dispossessed of Canaan, and those who dis-
possessed him dispossessed him dispossessed, and the five
hundred years of absentee landlords in the Roman bagnios,
and the thousand years of wQd men from the northern
woods who dispossessed diem and devoured their ravished
substance ravished in turn again and then snarled In what
you call the old world’s worthless twilight over the old
world’s gnawed bones, blasphemous In His name until He
used a simple egg to discover to them a new world where a
nation of people could be founded in humility and pity and
Sufferance and pride of one to another. And Grandfather
did own the land nevertheless and notwithstanding because
He permitted it, not impotent and not condoning and not

The Bear *49

blind because He ordered and watched it He saw the
land already accursed even as Ikkemotubbe and Ikkemo-
tubbe’s father old Issetlbbeha and old Issetibbeha’s fathers
too held it, already tainted even before any white man
owned it by what Grandfather and his kind, his fathers, had
brought into the new land which He had vouchsafed them
out of pity and sufferance, on condition of pity and humil-
ity and sufferance and endurance, from that old world’s
corrupt and worthless twilight as though in the sailfuls
of the old world's tainted wind which drove the ships — *
andMcCaslin

‘Ah.*

4 — and no hope for the land anywhere so long as Ik-
kemotubbe and Ikkemotubbe’s descendants held it in un-
broken succession. Maybe He saw that only by voiding
the land for a time of Ikkemotubbc’a blood and substitut-
ing for it another blood, could He accomplish His pur-
pose. Maybe He knew already what that other blood would
be, maybe it was more than justice that only the white
man’s blood was available and capable to raise the white
man’s curse, more than vengeance when-—* and McCaslin

‘Ah.*

• — when He used the blood which had brought In the
evil to destroy the evil as doctors use fever to bum up
fever, poison to slay poison. Maybe He chose Grandfather
out of all of them He might have picked. Maybe Ho knew
that Grandfather himself would not serve His purpose be-
cause Grandfather was bom too soon too, but that Grand-
father would have descendants, the right descendants;
maybe He had foreseen already the descendants Grand-
father would have, maybe He saw already in Grandfather
the seed progenitive of the three generations He saw it
would take to set at least some of His lowly people free—’
fturi McCaslin

2$0 WILLIAM FAULKNER

‘The sons of Ham. You who quote the Book: the sons
of Ham.’ and he

There are some things He said in the Book, and some
things reported of Him that He did not say. And I know
what you will say now: That if truth is one thing to me
and another thing to you, how will we choose which is
truth? You dont need to choose. The heart already knows.
He didn’t have His Book written to be read by what must
elect and choose, but by the heart, not by the wise of the
earth because maybe they dont need it or maybe the wise
no longer have any heart, but by the doomed and lowly
of the earth who have nothing else to read with but the
heart Because the men who wrote his Book for Him were
writing about truth and there is only one truth and it
covers all things that touch the heart’ and McCaslin

•So these men who transcribed His Book for Him were
sometime liars.* and he

*Yes. Because they were human men. They were trying
to write down the heart’s truth out of the heart’s driving
complexity, for all the complex and troubled hearts which
would beat after them. What they were trying to tell, what
He wanted said, was too simple. Those for whom they
transcribed His words could not have believed them. It
had to be expounded in the everyday terms which they
were familiar with and could comprehend, not only those
who listened but those who told it too, because if they
who were that near to Him as to have been elected from
among all who breathed and spoke language to transcribe
and relay His words, could comprehend truth only through
the complexity of passion and lust and hate and fear
which drives the heart, what distance back to truth must
they traverse whom truth could only reach by word-of-
mouth?’ and McCaslin

T might answer that, since you have taken to proving

The Bear 251

your points and disproving mine by the same text, I dont
know. But I dont say that, because you have answered
yourself: No time at all if, as you say, the heart knows
truth, the infallible and unerring heart And perhaps you
are right, since although you admitted three generations
from old Carothers to you, there were not three. There
were not even completely two. Uncle Buck and Uncle
Buddy. And they not the first and not alone. A thousand
other Bucks and Buddies in less than two generations and
sometimes less than one in this land which so you claim
God created and man himself cursed and tainted. Not to
mention 1865/ and ho

•Yes. More men than Father and Uncle Baddy/ not
even glancing toward the shelf above the desk, nor did
McCaslin. They did not need to. To him it was as though
the ledgers in their scarred cracked leather bindings were
being lifted down one by one in their fading sequence
and spread open on the desk or perhaps upon some apocry-
phal Bench or even Altar or perhaps before the Throne
Itself for a last perusal and contemplation and refresh-
ment of the Allknowledgeable before the yellowed pages
and the brown thin ink in which was recorded the injustice
and a little at least of its amelioration and restitution faded
back forever into the anonymous communal original dust

the yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink by the hand
first of his grandfather and then of his father and uncle,
bachelors up to and past fifty and then sixty, the one who
ran the plantation and the farming of it and die other
who did the housework and the cooking and continued
to do it even after his twin married and the boy himself
was bom

the two brothers who as soon as their father was buried
moved out of the tremendously conceived, the almost barn-
like edifice which he had not even completed, into a one-

1$1 WILLIAM FAULKNER

room log cabin which the two of them built themselves
and added other rooms to while they lived in it, refusing
to allow any slave to touch any timber of it other than the
actual raising into place the logs which two men alone
could not handle, and domiciled all the slaves in the big
house some of the windows of which were still merely
boarded up with odds and ends of plank or with the skins
of bear and deer nailed over the empty frames: each sun-
down the brother who superintended the farming would
parade the Negroes as a first sergeant dismisses a company,
and herd them willynilly, man woman and child, without
question protest or recourse, into the tremendous abortive
edifice scarcely yet out of embryo, as if even old Carothers
McCaslin had paused aghast at the concrete indication of
his own vanity's boundless conceiving: he would call his
mental roll and herd them in and with a hand-wrought
nail as long as a flenching-knife and suspended from a short
deer-hide thong attached to the door-jamb for that pur-
pose, he would nail to the door of that house which lacked
half its windows and had no hinged back door at all, so
that presently and for fifty years afterward, when the boy
himself was big enough to hear and remember it, there was
in the land a sort of folk tale: of the countryside all night
long full of skulking McCaslin slaves dodging the moonlit
roads and the Patrol-riders to visit other plantations, and of
the unspoken gentlemen’s agreement between the two white
men and the two dozen black ones that, after the white
man had counted them and driven the homemade nail into
the front door at sundown, neither of the white men would
go around behind the house and look at the back door,
provided that all the Negroes were behind the front one
when the brother who drove it drew out the nail again at
daybreak

the twins who were identical even in their handwriting,

The Bear 253

unless yon had specimens side by side to compare, and even
when both hands appeared on the same page (as often hap-
pened, as if, long since past any oral intercourse, they had
used the diumally advancing pages to conduct the un-
avoidable business of the compulsion which had traversed
all the waste wilderness of North Mississippi in 1 830 and
*40 and singled them out to drive) they both looked as
though they had been written by the same perfectly nor-
mal ten-year-old boy, even to the spelling, except that the
spelling did not improve as one by one the slaves which
Carothers McCaslin had inherited and purchased — Ros-
cius and Phoebe and Thucydides and Eunice and their
descendants, and Sam Fathers and his mother for both of
whom he had swapped an underbred trotting gelding to
old Ikkemotubbe, the Chickasaw chief from whom he had
likewise bought the land, and Tennie Beauchamp whom
the twin Amodeus had won from a neighbor in a poker
game, and the anomaly calling itself Percival Brownlee
which the twin Theophilus had purchased, neither he nor
his brother ever knew why apparently, from Bedford For-
rest while he was still only a slave-dealer and not yet a
general (It was a single page, not long and covering less
than a year, not seven months in fact, begun in the hand
which the boy had learned to distinguish as that of his
father:

Percavil Brownly 26 yr Old . cleark @ Bookepper •
bought from NJBJForest at Cold Water 3 Mar 1856
$265. dolors

and beneath that, in die same hand:

5 mar 1856 No bookepper any way Cant read . Can
write his Name but I already put that down My self
Says he can Plough but dont look like it to Me* sent
toFeildtodayMarS 1856

254 WILLIAM FAULKNER
and the same hand:

6 Mar 1856 Cant plough either Says he aims to be a
Precher so may be he can lead live stock to Crick to
Drink

and this time It was the other, the hand which he now
recognised as his uncle’s when he could see them both on
the same page:

Mar 23th 1856 Cant do that either Except one at a
Time Get shut of him

then the first again:

24 Mar 1856 Who in hell would buy him
then the second:

19th of Apr 1856 Nobody You put yourself out of
Market at Cold Water tw>o months ago 1 never said
sell him Free him

the first:

22 Apr 1856 III get it out of him
the second:

Jun 13th 1856 How $1 per yr 265$ 265 yrs Whott
sign his Free paper

then the first again:

1 Oct 1856 Mule Josephine Broke Leg (2> shot Wrong
stall wrong niger wrong everything $100. dolors

and the same:

2 Oct 1856 Freed Debit McCaslin @ McCaslin $265.
dolors

The Bear

*55

then the second again;

Oct 3th Debit Theophilus McCasUn Niger 265$
Mule 100$ 365$ He hasnt gone yet Father should be
here

then the first:

3 Oct 1856 Son cf a bitch wont leave What would
father done

die second:

29th of Oct 1856 Renamed him
the first;

31 Oct 1856 Renamed him what
the second:

Chrstms 1856 Spintrius

) took substance and even a sort of shadowy life with their
passions and complexities too as page followed page and
year year; all there, not only the general and condoned
injustice and its slow amortization but the specific tragedy
which had not been condoned and could never be amortized,
the new page and the new ledger, the hand which he
could now recognise at first glance as his father’s:

Father dide Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin , Cal~
Una 1772 Missippy 1837 . Dide and burid 27 June
1837

Roskus . rased by Granfather in Callina Dont know
how old . Freed 27 June 1837 Dont want to leave •
Dide and Burid 12 Jan 1841

Fibby Roskus Wife, bought by granfather in CalUna
says Fifty Freed 27 June 1837 Dont want to leave •
Dide and burd 1 Aug 1849

2 $6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Thucydus Roskus @ Fibby Son bom in Callina 1779m
Refused lOacre peace fathers Will 28 Jun 1837 Re~
fused Cash offer $200. dolors from A.@ T. McCastin
28 Jun 1837 Wants to stay and work it out

and beneath this and covering the next five pages and
almost that many years, the slow, day-by-day accrument
of the wages allowed him and the food and clothing — the
molasses and meat and meal, the cheap durable shirts and
jeans and shoes and now and then a coat against rain and
cold — charged against the slowly yet steadily mounting
sum of balance (and it would seem to the boy that he could
actually see the black man, the slave whom Ms wMte owner
had forever manumitted by the very act from wMch the
black man could never be free so long as memory lasted,
entering the commissary, asking permission perhaps of the
white man’s son to see the ledger-page wMch he could not
even read, not even asking for the wMte man’s word, which
he would have had to accept for the reason that there was
absolutely no way under the sun for him to test it, as to
how the account stood, how much longer before he could
go and never return, even if only as far as Jefferson seven-
teen miles away) on to the double pen-stroke closing die
final entry:

3 Nov 1841 By Cash to Thucydus McCaslin $200.
dolors Set Up blaksmith in J. Dec 1841 Dide and
burid ini. 17 feb 1854

Eunice Bought by Father in New Orleans 1807 $650.
dolors. Marrid to Thucydus 1809 Drownd in Crick
Cristmas Day 1832

and then the other hand appeared, die first time he had
seen it in the ledger to distinguish it as his uncle’s, the
cook and housekeeper whom even McCaslin, who had

The Bear 257

known Mm and the boy’s father for sixteen years before the
boy was born, remembered as sitting all day long in the
rocking chair from which he cooked the food, before the
kitchen fire on wMch he cooked it:

June 21th 1 833 Drownd herself
and the first:

23 Jun 1833 Who in hell ever heard of a niger

drownding him self

and the second, unhurried, with a complete finality; the
two identical entries might have been made with a rubber
stamp save for the date:

Aug 13th 1833 Drownd herself

and he thought But why? But why? He was sixteen then*
It was neither the first time he had been alone in the com-
missary nor the first time he had taken down the old ledgers
familiar on their shelf above the desk ever since he could
remember. As a child and even after nine and ten and
eleven, when he had learned to read, he would look up
at the scarred and cracked backs and ends but with no par-
ticular desire to open them, and though he intended to
examine them someday because he realised that they prob-
ably contained a chronological and much more compre-
hensive though doubtless tedious record than he would
ever get from any other source, not alone of Ms own flesh
and blood but of all Ms people, not only the wMtes but the
black ones too, who were as much a part of his ancestry as
Ms white progenitors, and cf the land which they had all
held and used in common and fed from and on and would
continue to use in common without regard to color or
titular ownersMp, it would only be on some idle day when
he was old and perhaps even bored a little since what the

258 WILLIAM FAULKNER

old books contained would be after all these years fixed
immutably, finished, unalterable, harmless. Then he was
sixteen* He knew what he was going to find before ho
found it He got the commissary key from McCaslin’s room
after midnight while McCasiin was asleep and with the
commissary door shut and locked behind him and the for-
gotten lantern stinking anew the rank dead icy air, he
leaned above the yellowed page and thought not Why
drowned herself, but thinking what he believed his father
had thought when he found his brother’s first comment:
Why did Uncle Buddy think she had drowned herself?
finding, beginning to find on the next succeeding page
what he knew he would find, only this was still not it be-
cause he already knew this:

Tomaslna celled Tomy Daughter of Thucydus ©

Eunice Born 1810 dide in Child bed June 1833 and

Burd \ Yr stars fell

nor the next:

Yuri Son of Thucydus © Eunice Tomy bom Jun

1833 yr stars fell Fathers will

and nothing more, no tedious recording filling this page
of wages day by day and food and clothing charged against
them, no entry of his death and burial because he had out-
lived his white half-brothers and the books which McCasiin
kept did not include obituaries: just Fathers will and he
had seen that too: old Car others’ bold cramped hand far
less legible than his sons’ even and not much better in
spelling, who while capitalising almost every noun and
verb, made no effort to punctuate or construct whatever,
just as he made no effort either to explain or obfuscate the
thousand-dollar legacy to the son of an unmarried slave-
girl, to be paid only at the child’s coming-of-age, bearing

The Bear 259

the consequence of the act of which there was still no
definite incontrovertible proof that he acknowledged, not
out of his own substance but penalising his sons with it,
charging them a cash forfeit on the accident of their own
paternity; not even a bribe for silence toward his own fame
since his fame would suffer only after he was no longer
present to defend it, flinging almost contemptuously, as he
might a cast-off hat or pair of shoes, the thousand dollars
which could have had no more reality to him under those
conditions than it would have to the Negro, the slave who
would not even see it until he came of age, twenty-one
years too late to begin to learn what money was. So I
reckon that was cheaper than saying My son to a nigger
he thought. Even if My son wasn't but just two words .
But there must have been love he thought. Some sort
of love. Even what he would have called love: not just an
afternoon's or a nighfs spittoon. There was the old man,
old, within five years of his life’s end, long a widower and,
since his sons were not only bachelors but were approach-
ing middle age, lonely in the house and doubtless even
bored since his plantation was established now and func-
tioning and there was enough money now, too much of
it probably for a man whose vices even apparently re-
mained below his means; there was the girl, husbandless
and young, only twenty-three when the child was bom:
perhaps he had sent for her at first out of loneliness, to
have a young voice and movement in the house, sum-
moned her, bade her mother send her each morning to
sweep the floors and make the beds and the mother
acquiescing since that was probably already understood,
already planned: the only child of a couple who were not
field hands and who held themselves something above
the other slaves not alone for that reason but because
the husband and his father and mother too had been

2<So WILLIAM FAULKNER

inherited by the white man from his father, and the white
man himself had travelled three hundred miles and better
to New Orleans in a day when men travelled by horseback
or steamboat, and bought the girl’s mother as a wife for
and that was all. The old frail pages seemed to turn of
their own accord even while he thought His own daughter
His own daughter . No No Not even him back to that one
where the white man (not even a widower then) who never
went anywhere any more than his sons in their time ever
did and who did not need another slave, had gone all the
way to New Orleans and bought one. And Tomey’s Terrel
was still alive when the boy was ten years old and he knew
from his own observation and memory that there had al-
ready been some white in Tomey’s Terrel’s blood before
his father gave him the rest of it; and looking down at the
yellowed page spread beneath the yellow glow of the lan-
tern smoking and stinking in that rank chill midnight room
fifty years later, he seemed to see her actually walking into
the icy creek on that Christmas day six months before her
daughter’s and her lover’s ( Her first lover's he thought.
Her first) child was bom, solitary, inflexible, griefless,
ceremonial, in formal and succinct repudiation of grief
and despair who had already had to repudiate belief and
hope

that was ah. He would never need look at the ledgers
again nor did he; the yellowed pages in their fading and
implacable succession were as much a part of his con-
sciousness and would remain so forever, as the fact of his
own nativity:

Tennie Beauchamp 21yrs Won by Amodeus McCas-
lin from Hubert Beauchamp Esqre Possible Strait
against three Treys in sigt Not called 1859 Marrid to
Tomys Turl 1859

The Bear 261

and no date of freedom because her freedom, as well as
that of her first surviving child, derived not from Buck and
Buddy McCaslin in the commissary but from a stranger in
Washington and no date of death and burial, not only be-
cause McCaslin kept no obituaries in his books, but be-
cause in this year 1883 she was still alive and would re-
main so to see a grandson by her last surviving child:

Amodeus McCaslin Beauchamp Son of tomys Turl

@ Tennie Beauchamp 1859 dide 1859

then his uncle’s hand entire, because his father was now
a member of the cavalry command of that man whose
name as a slave-dealer he could not even spell: and not
even apage and not even a full line:

Dauter Tomes Turl and tenny 1862

and not even a line and not even a sex and no cause given
though the boy could guess it because McCaslin was thir-
teen then and he remembered how there was not always
enough to eat in more places than Vicksburg:

Child of tomes Turl and Tenny 1863

and the same hand again and this one lived, as though
Tennie’s perseverance and the fading and diluted ghost
of old Carothers’ ruthlessness had at last conquered even
starvation: and clearer, fuller, more carefully written and
spelled than the boy had yet seen it, as if the old man,
who should have been a woman to begin with, trying to
run what was left of the plantation in his brother’s absence
in the intervals of cooking and caring for himself and
the fourteen-year-old orphan, had taken as an omen for
renewed hope the fact that this nameless inheritor of slaves
was at least remaining alive long enough to receive a name:

Z6l WILLIAM FAULKNER

James Thucydus Beauchamp Son of Tomes Turl and
Tenny Beauchamp Bom 29th december 1864 and
both Well Wanted to call him Theophilus but Tride
Amodeus McCaslin and Callina McCaslin and both
dide so Disswaded Them Born at Two clock , Ajm,
both Well

but no more, nothing; it would be another two years yet
before the boy, almost a man now, would return from the
abortive trip into Tennessee with the still-intact third of
old Carothers* legacy to his Negro son and his descendants,
which as the three surviving children established at last
one by one their apparent intention of surviving, their white
half-uncles had increased to a thousand dollars each, con-
ditions permitting, as they came of age, and completed the
page himself as far as it would even be completed when
that day was long passed beyond which a man bora in
1864 (or 1867 either, when he himself saw light) could
have expected or himself hoped or even wanted to be
still alive; his own hand now, queerly enough resembling
neither his father’s nor his uncle’s nor even McCaslin’s,
but like that of his grandfather’s save for the spelling:

Vanished sometime on night of his twenty-first birth-
day Dec 29 1885 . Traced by Isaac McCaslin to Jack-
son Tenn. and there lost His third' of legacy $1000.00
returned to McCaslin Edmonds Trustee this day Jan
12 1886

but not yet: that would be two years yet, and now his
father’s again, whose old commander was now quit of
soldiering and slave-trading both; once more in the ledger
and then not again and more illegible than ever, almost
indecipherable at all from the rheumatism which now crip-
pled him and almost completely innocent now even of any

The Bear 263

sort of speDing as well as punctuation, as if the four years
during which he had followed the sword of the only man
ever breathing who ever sold him a Negro, let alone beat
him in a trade, had convinced him not only of the vanity of
faith and hope but of orthography too:

Misssophonsiba b dtrtt 1 1869

but not of belief and will because it was there, written, as
McCaslin had told him, with the left hand, but there in the
ledger one time more and then not again, for the boy
himself was a year old, and when Lucas was bom six
years later, bis father and unde had been dead inside the
same twelve-months almost five years; his own hand again,
who was there and saw it, 1886, she was just seventeen,
two years younger than himself, and he was in the com-
missary when McCaslin entered out of the first of dusk
and said, *He wants to marry Fonsiba,’ like that: and he
looked past McCaslin and saw the man, the stranger, taller
than McCaslin and wearing better dothes than McCaslin
and most of the other white men the boy knew habitually
wore, who entered the room like a white man and stood
in it like a white man, as though he had let McCaslin
precede him into it not because McCaslin’s skin was white
but simply because McCaslin lived there and knew the
way, and who talked like a white man too, looking at him
past McCaslin’s shoulder rapidly and keenly once and
then no more, without further interest, as a mature and
contained white man not impatient but just pressed for
time might have looked. ‘Marry Fonsiba?’ he cried. ‘Marry
Fonsiba?* and then no more either, just watching and
listening while McCaslin and the Negro talked:

*To five in Arkansas, I believe you said,’

*Yes. I have property there. A farm.*

‘Property? A farm? You own it?’

264 WILLIAM FAULKNER
‘Yes.*

*You dont say Sir, do you?*

*To my elders, yes/

•I see. You are from the North.*

•Yes. Since a child/

•Then your father was a slave/

•Yes. Once/

•Then how do you own a farm in Arkansas?*

•I have a grant. It was my father’s. From the United
States. For military service/

T see/ McCaslin said. *1110 Yankee army/

•The United States army/ the stranger said; and then
himself again, crying it at McCaslin’s back:

•CaH Aunt Tenniel I’ll go get her! I’ll—* But McCaslin
was not even including him; the stranger did not even
glance back toward his voice, the two of them speaking
to one another again as if he were not even there:

•Since you seem to have it all settled/ McCaslin said,
•why have you bothered to consult my authority at all?’

4 I dont/ the stranger said. T acknowledge your authority
only so far as you admit your responsibility toward her as
a female member of the family of which you are the head.

I dont ask your permission. I *

That will do!* McCaslin said. But the stranger did not
falter. It was neither as if he were ignoring McCaslin nor
as if he had failed to hear him . It was as though he were
making, not at all an excuse and not exactly a justification,
but simply a statement which the situation absolutely re*
quired and demanded should be made in McCaslin’s hear-
ing whether McCaslin listened to it or not It was as if he
were talking to himself, for himself to hear the words
spoken aloud. They faced one another, not close yet at
slightly less than foils* distance, erect, their voices not
raised, not impactive, just succinct:

The Bear 265

* — I inform you, notify you in advance as cliief of her
family. No man of honor could do less. Besides, you have.
In your way, according to your lights and upbringing •

< That’s enough, I said/ McCaslin said. ‘Be off this place
by full dark. Go.’ But for another moment the other did
not move, contemplating McCaslin with that detached and
heatless look, as if he were watching reflected in Mo
Caslin’s pupils the tiny image of the figure he was sus-
taining.

*Yes/ he said. ‘After all, this is your house. And in
your fashion you have. . . . But no matter. You are right
This is enough.’ He turned back toward the door; he
paused again but only for a second, already moving while
he spoke: ‘Be easy. I will be good to her/ Then he was
gone.

‘But how did she ever know him?’ the boy cried. *1
never even heard of him before! And Fonsiba, that’s never
been off this place except to go to church since she was
bom- ’

‘Ha/ McCaslin said. ‘Even their parents dont know
until too late how seventeen-year-old girls ever met the
men who marry them too, if they are lucky/ And the next
morning they were both gone, Fonsiba too. McCaslin never
saw her again, nor did he, because the woman he found
at last five months later was no one he had ever known.
He carried a third of the three-thousand-dollar fund in
gold in a money-belt, as when he had vainly traced Ten-
nie’s Jim into Tennessee a year ago. They — the man — had
left an address of some sort with Tennie, and three months
later a letter came, written by the man although McCaslin’s
wife Alice had taught Fonsiba to read and write too a
little. But it bore a different postmark from the address
the man bad left with Tennie, and he travelled by rail as
far as he could and then by contracted stage and then by a

266 WILLIAM FAULKNER

hired livery rig and then by rail again for a distance: an
experienced traveller by now and an experienced blood-
hound too and a successful one this time because he would
have to be; as the slow interminable empty muddy Decem-
ber miles crawled and crawled and night followed night in
hotels, in roadside taverns of rough logs and containing
little else but a bar, and in the cabins of strangers and the
hay of lonely barns, in none of which he dared undress be-
cause of his secret golden girdle like that of a disguised one
of the Magi travelling incognito and not even hope to draw
him but only determination and desperation, he would teU
himself: 1 will have to find her . I will have to. We have
already lost one oj them. I will have to find her this time .
He did. Hunched in the slow and icy rain, on a spent hired
horse splashed to the chest and higher, he saw it — a single
log edifice with a clay chimney which seemed in process
of being flattened by the rain to a nameless and valueless
rubble of dissolution in that roadless and even pathless
waste of unfenced fallow and wilderness jungle — no bam,
no stable, not so much as a hen-coop: just a log cabin
built by hand and no clever hand either, a meagre pile of
clumsily cut firewood sufficient for about one day and not
even a gaunt hound to come bellowing out from under the
house when he rode up— a farm only in embryo, perhaps a
good farm, maybe even a plantation someday, but not now,
not for years yet and only then with labor, hard and endur-
ing and unflagging work and sacrifice; he shoved open the
crazy kitchen door in its awry frame and entered an icy
gloom where not even a fire for cooking burned and after
another moment saw, crouched into the wall’s angle behind
a crude table, the coffee-colored face which he had known
all his life but knew no more, the body which had been
bom within a hundred yards of the room that he was bom
in and in which some of his own blood ran but which was

The Bear 267

now completely inheritor of generation after generation
to whom an unannounced white man on a horse was a
white man’s hired Patroller wearing a pistol sometimes
and a blacksnake whip always; he entered the next room,
the only other room the cabin owned, and found, sitting
In a rocking chair before the hearth, the man himself, read*
ing — sitting there in the only chair in the house, before
that miserable fire for which there was not wood sufficient
to last twenty-four hours, in the same ministerial clothing
in which he had entered the commissary five months ago
and a pair of gold-framed spectacles which, when he looked
up and then rose to his feet, the boy saw did not even
contain lenses, reading a book in the midst of that desola-
tion, that muddy waste fenceless and even pathless and
without even a walled shed for stock to stand beneath:
and over all, permeant, clinging to the man’s very clothing
and exuding from his skin itself, that rank stink of base-
less and imbecile delusion, that boundless rapacity and
folly, of the carpet-bagger followers of victorious armies.

T>ont you see?’ he cried. T>ont you see? This whole land,
the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from
it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under
the curse? Granted that my people brought the curse onto
the land: maybe for that reason their descendants alone
can — not resist it, not combat it — maybe just endure and
outlast it until the curse is lifted. Then your peoples’ turn
will come because we have forfeited ours. But* not now*
Not yet. Dont you see?’

The other stood now, the unfrayed garments still minis-
terial even if not quite so fine, the book closed upon one
finger to keep the place, the lenseless spectacles held like
a music master’s wand in the other workless hand while the
owner of it spoke his measured and sonorous imbecility of
the boundless folly and the baseless hope: ‘You’re wrong.

268 WILLIAM FAULKNER

The curse you whites brought into this land has been lifted.
It has been voided and discharged. We are seeing a new
era, an era dedicated, as our founders intended it, to free-
dom, liberty and equality for all, to which this country

will be the new Canaan

‘Freedom from what? From work? Canaan?* He jerked
his arm, comprehensive, almost violent: whereupon it all
seemed to stand there about them, intact and complete and
visible in the drafty, damp, heatless, Negro-stale Negro-rank
sorry room — the empty fields without plow or seed to work
them, fenceless against the stock which did not exist within
or without the walled stable which likewise was not there,
•What comer of Canaan is this?*

*You are seeing it at a bad time. This is winter. No
man farms this time of year.*

T see. And of course her need for food and clothing
will stand still while the land lies fallow.*

T have a pension/ the other said. He said it as a man
might say I have grace or / own a gold mine . T have my
father’s pension too. It will arrive on the first of the month.
What day is this?’

•The eleventh/ he said. ‘Twenty days more. And until
then?’

‘I have a few groceries in the house from my credit
account with the merchant in Midnight who banks my
pension check for me. I have executed to him a power of

attorney to handle it for me as a matter of mutual *

T see. And if the groceries dont last the twenty days?*
T still have one more hog.*

•Where?’

‘Outside/ the other said. Tt is customary in this country
to allow stock to range free during the winter for food.
It comes up from time to time. But no matter if it doesn’t;
I can probably trace its footprints when the need—*

The Bear 269

*Yes!’ he cried ‘Became no matter: you still have the
pension check- And the man in Midnight will sash it and
pay himself out of it for what you havo already eaten
and if there is any left over, it is yours. And the hog will
be eaten by then or you still cant catch it, and then what
will you do?’

‘It will be almost spring then/ the other said *1 am
planning in the spring 9

‘It will be January/ he said ‘And then February. And
then more than half of March — * and when he stopped
again in the kitchen she had not moved, she did not even
seem to breathe or to be alive except her eyes watching
him; when he took a step toward her it was still not move-
ment because she could have retreated no further: only
the tremendous fathomless ink-colored eyes in the nar-
row, thin, too thin coffee-colored face watching him with-
out alarm, without recognition, without hope. Tonsiba/ he
said. ‘Fonsiba. Are you all right?’

‘I’m free/ she said. Midnight was a tavern, a livery
stable, a big store (that would be where the pension check
banked itself as a matter of mutual elimination of bother
and fret, he thought) and a little one, a saloon and a black-
smith shop. But there was a bank there too. The president
(the owner, for all practical purposes) of it was a trans-
lated Mississippian who had been one of Forrest’s men too:
and his body lightened of the golden belt for the first time
since he left home eight days ago, with pencil and paper he
multiplied three dollars by twelve months and divided it
into one thousand dollars; it would stretch that way over
almost twenty-eight years and for twenty-eight years at
least she would not starve, the banker promising to send
the three dollars himself by a trusty messenger on the
fifteenth of each month and put it into her actual hand, and
he returned home and that was all because in 1874 his

270 WILLIAM FAULKNER

father and his uncle were both dead and the old ledgers
never again came down from the shelf above the desk to
which his father had returned them for the last time that
day in 1869. But he could have completed it:

Lucas Quintus Carothers McCaslin Beauchamp . Last
surviving son and child of Tomey's Terrel and Ten-
rue Beauchamp. March 17, 1874

except that there was no need: not Lucius Quintus @c
@c, but Lucas Quintus, not refusing to be called Lucius,
because he simply eliminated that word from the name;
not denying, declining the name itself, because he used
three quarters of it; but simply taking the name and chang-
ing, altering it, making it no longer the white man’s but
his own, by himself composed, himself selfprogenitive and
nominate, by himself ancestored, as, for all the old ledgers
recorded to the contrary, old Carothers himself was

and that was all: 1874 the boy; 1888 the man, repudi-
ated denied and free; 1895 and husband but no father,
unwidowered but without a wife, and found long since
that no man is ever free and probably could not bear it if
he were; married then and living in Jefferson in the little
new jerrybuilt bungalow which his wife’s father had given
them: and one morning Lucas stood suddenly in the door-
way of the room where he was reading the Memphis paper
and he looked at the paper’s dateline and thought Its his
birthday. He's twenty-one today and Lucas said: ‘Whar’s
the rest of that money old Carothers left? I wants it. All
of it.*

that was all: and McCaslin

‘More men than that one Buck and Buddy to fumble-
heed that truth so mazed for them that spoke it and so
confused for them that heard yet still there was 1865:*
and he

The Bear 271

‘But not enough. Not enough of even Father and Uncle
Buddy to fumble-heed in even three generations not even
three generations fathered by Grandfather not even if there
had been nowhere beneath His sight any but Grandfather
and so He would not even have needed to elect and choose.
But He tried and I know what you will say. That having
Himself created them He could have known no more of
hope than He could have pride and grief but He didn’t
hope He just waited because He had made them: not just
because He had set them alive and in motion but because
He had already worried with them so long: worried with
them so long because He had seen how in individual cases
they were capable of anything any height or depth remem-
bered in mazed incomprehension out of heaven where hell
was created too and so He must admit them or else admit
His equal somewhere and so be no longer God and there-
fore must accept responsibility for what He Himself had
done in order to live with Himself in His lonely and para-
mount heaven. And He probably knew it was vain but He
had created them and knew them capable of all things be-
cause He had shaped them out of the primal Absolute
which contained all and had watched them since in their
individual exaltation and baseness and they themselves
not knowing why nor how nor even when: until at last He
saw that they were all Grandfather all of them and that
even from them the elected and chosen the best the very
best He could expect (not hope mind: not hope) would be
Bucks and Buddies and not even enough of them and in the
third generation not even Bucks and Buddies but — ’ and
McCaslin

‘Ah:’ and he

‘Yes. If He could see Father and Uncle Buddy in Grand-
father He must have seen me too — an Isaac bora into a
later life than Abraham’s and repudiating immolation:

27* WILLIAM FAULKNER

fatherless and therefore safe declining the altar because
maybe this time the exasperated Hand might not supply
the kid — ’ and McCaslin

‘Escape :* and he

‘All right Escape. — Until one day He said what you
told Fonsiba’s husband that afternoon here in this room:
This will do . This is enough ; not in exasperation or rage or
even just sick to death as you were sick that day: just This
is enough and looked about for one last time, for one time
more since He had created them, upon this land this South
for which He had done so much with woods for game and
streams for fish and deep rich soil for seed and lush springs
to sprout it and long summers to mature it and serene falls
to harvest it and short mild winters for men and animals
and saw no hope anywhere and looked beyond it where
hope should have been, where to East North and West lay
illimitable that whole hopeful continent dedicated as a
refuge and sanctuary of liberty and freedom from what you
called the old world’s worthless evening and saw the rich
descendants of slavers, females of both sexes, to whom the
black they shrieked of was another specimen another ex-
ample like the Brazilian macaw brought home in a cage
by a traveller, passing resolutions about horror and outrage
in warm and air-proof halls: and the thundering cannonade
of politicians earning votes and the medicine-shows of
pulpiteers earning Chautauqua fees, to whom the outrage
and the injustice were as much abstractions as Tariff or
Silver or Immortality and who employed the very shackles
of its servitude and the sorry rags of its regalia as they did
the other beer and banners and mottoes redfire and brim-
stone and sleight-of-hand and musical handsaws: and the
whirling wheels which manufactured for a profit the pris-
tine replacements of the shackles and shoddy garments as
they wore out and spun the cotton and made the gins
which ginned it and the cars and ships which hauled it, and

The Bear 273

the men who ran the wheels for that profit and established
and collected the taxes it was taxed with and the rates for
hauling it and the commissions for selling it: and He could
have repudiated them since they were his creation now and
forever more throughout all their generations until not only
that old world from which He had rescued them but this
new one too which He had revealed and led them to as a
sanctuary and refuge were become the same worthless tide-
less rock cooling in the last crimson evening except that out
of all that empty sound and bootless fury one silence,
among that loud and moiling all of them just one simple
enough to believe that horror and outrage were first and
last simply horror and outrage and was crude enough to act
upon that, illiterate and had no words for talking or per-
haps was just busy and had no time to, one out of them all
who did not bother Him with cajolery and adjuration then
pleading then threat and had not even bothered to inform
Him in advance what he was about so that a lesser than He
might have even missed the simple act of lifting the long
ancestral musket down from the deerhoms above the door,
whereupon He said My name is Brown too and the other
So is mine and He Then mine or yours cant be because I am
against it and the other So am I and He triumphantly Then
where are you going with that gun? and the other told him
in one sentence one word and He: amazed: Who knew
neither hope nor pride nor grief But your Association, your
Committee, your Officers . Where are your Minutes, your
Motions, your Parliamentary Procedures? and the other
/ aint against them. They are all right I reckon lor them
that have the time . I am just against the weak because they
ore niggers being held in bondage by the strong just be-
cause they are white. So He turned once more to this land
which He still intended to save because He had done so
much for it — ’ and McCaslin
*What?’ and he

274 WILLIAM FAULKNER

* — to these people He was still committed to because
they were his creations — ’ and McCaslin
Turned back to us? His face to us?' and he
‘ — whose wives and daughters at least made soups and
jellies for them when they were sick and carried the trays
through die mud and the winter too into the stinking cab-
ins and sat in die stinking cabins and kept fires going until
crises came and passed but that was not enough: and when
they were very sick had them carried into the big house
itself into die company room itself maybe and nursed them
there which the white man would have done too for any
other of his cattle that was sick but at least die man who
hired one from a livery wouldn’t have and still that was
not enough: so that He said and not in grief either Who
had made them and so could know no more of grief than
He could of pride or hope: Apparently they can learn
nothing save through suffering, remember nothing save
when underlined in blood — ' and McCaslin

’Ashby on an afternoon’s ride, to call on some remote
maiden cousins of his mother or maybe just acquaintances
of hers, comes by chance upon a minor engagement of out-
posts mid dismounts and with his crimson-fined cloak for
target leads a handful of troops he never saw before against
an entrenched position of backwoods-trained riflemen.
Lee’s battle-order, wrapped maybe about a handful of
cigars and doubtless thrown away whoa the last cigar was
smoked, found by a Yankee Intelligence officer on the floor
of a saloon behind the Yankee lines after Lee had already
divided his forces before Sharpsburg. Jackson on the Flank
Road, already rolled up the flank which Hooker believed
could not be turned and, waiting only for night to pass to
continue the brutal and incessant slogging which would
fling that whole wing back into Hooter’s lap where he sat
on a front gallery in Chancellorsville drinking rum toddies

The Bear 275

and telegraphing Lincoln that he had defeated Lee, k shot
from among a whole covey of minor officers and in the
blind night by one of his own patrols, leaving as next by
seniority Stuart the gallant man bom apparently already
horsed and sabred and already knowing all there was to
know about war except the slogging and brutal stupidity of
It: and that same Stuart off raiding Pennsylvania hen-
roosts when Lee should have known of all of Meade just
where Hancock was on Cemetery Ridge: and Longstreet
too at Gettysburg and that same Longstreet shot out of
saddle by his own men in the dark by mistake just as Jack-
son was. His face to us? His face to us?* and he

‘How else have made them fight? Who else but Jacksons
and Stuarts and Ashbys and Morgans and Forrests? — the
farmers of the central and middle-west, holding land by
the acre instead of the tens or maybe even the hundreds,
farming it themselves and to no single crop of cotton or
tobacco or cane, owning no slaves and needing and want-
ing none and already looking toward the Pacific coast, not
always as long as two generations there and having stopped
where they did stop only through the fortuitous mischance
that an ox died or a wagon-axle broke. And the New Eng-
land mechanics who didn’t even own land and measured
all things by the weight of water and the cost of turning
wheels and die narrow fringe of traders and ship-owners
still looking backward across the Atlantic and attached to
the continent only by their counting-houses. And those
who should have had the alertness to see: the wildcat
manipulators of mythical wilderness townsites; and the
astuteness to rationalise: the bankers who held the mort-
gages on the land which the first were only waiting to
abandon and on the railroads and steamboats to carry
diem still further west, and on the factories and the wheels
and the rented tenements those who ran them lived in; and

27<S WILLIAM FAULKNER

the leisure and scope to comprehend and fear in time and
even anticipate: the Boston-bred (even when not bom in
Boston) spinster descendants of long lines of afaiiforiy
bred and likewise spinster aunts and uncles whose hands
knew no callus except that of the indicting pen, to whom
the wilderness itself began at the top of tide and who
looked, if at anything other than Beacon Hill, only toward
heaven— not to mention all the loud rabble of the camp-
followers of pioneers: the bellowing of politicians, the
mellifluous choiring of self-styled men of God, the — ’ and
McCaslin

‘Here, here. Wait a minute:’ and he

•Let me talk now. I’m trying to explain to the head of
my family something which I have got to do which I dont
quite understand myself, not in justification of it but to
explain it if I can. I could say I dont know why I must do
it but that I do know 1 have got to because I have got my-
self to live with for the rest of my life and all I want is
peace to do it in. But you are the head of my family. More.
I knew a long time ago that I would never have to miss my
father, even if you are just finding out that you have missed
your son. — the drawers of bills and the shavers of notes
and the schoolmasters and the self-ordained to teach and
lead and all that horde of the semi-literate with a white
shirt but no change for it, with one eye on themselves and
watching each other with the other one. Who else could
have made them fight: could have struck them so aghast
with fear and dread as to turn shoulder to shoulder and
face one way and even stop talking for a while and even
after two years of it keep them still so wrung with terror
that some among them would seriously propose moving
their very capital into a foreign country lest it be ravaged
and pillaged by a people whose entire white male popula-
tion would have little more than filled any one of their

The Bear 277

larger cities: except Jackson in the Valley and three sepa-
rate armies trying to catch him and none of them ever
knowing whether they were just retreating from a battle or
just running into one and Stuart riding his whole com-
mand entirely around the biggest single armed force this
continent ever saw in order to see what it looked like from
behind and Morgan leading a cavalry charge against a
stranded man-of-war. Who else could have declared a war
against a power with ten times the area and a hundred
times the men and a thousand times the resources, except
men who could believe that all necessary to conduct a suc-
cessful war was not acumen nor shrewdness nor politics nor
diplomacy nor money nor even integrity and simple arith-
metic but just love of land and courage ’

‘And an unblemished and gallant ancestry and the abil-
ity to ride a horse,’ McCaslin said. ‘Dont leave that out/
It was evening now, the tranquil sunset of October mazy
with windless woodsmoke. The cotton was long since
picked and ginned, and all day now the wagons loaded with
gathered com moved between field and crib, processional
across the enduring land. ‘Well, maybe that’s what He
wanted. At least, that’s what He got.’ This time there was
no yellowed procession of fading and harmless ledger-
pages. This was chronicled in a harsher book and McCas-
lin, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, had seen it and the
boy himself had inherited it as Noah’s grandchildren had
inherited the Hood although they had not been there to
see the deluge: that dark corrupt and bloody time while
three separate peoples had tried to adjust not only to one
another but to the new land which they had created and
inherited too and must live in for the reason that those who
had lost it were no less free to quit it than those who had
gained it were: — those upon whom freedom and equality
had been dumped overnight and without warning or prepa-

278 WILLIAM FAULKNER

ration or any training in how to employ it or even just en-
dure it and who misused it not as children would nor yet
because they had been so long in bondage and then so
suddenly freed, but misused it as human beings always
misuse freedom, so that he thought Apparently there is a
wisdom beyond even that learned through suffering neces-
sary for a man to distinguish between liberty and license;
those who had fought for four years and lost to preserve a
condition under which that franchisement was anomaly
and paradox, not because they were opposed to freedom as
freedom but for the old reasons for which man (not the
generals and politicians but man) has always fought and
died in wars: to preserve a status quo or to establish a
better future one to endure for his children; and lastly, as
if that were not enough for bitterness and hatred and fear,
that third race even more alien to the people whom they
resembled in pigment and in whom even the same blood
ran, than to the people whom they did not — that race
threefold in one and alien even among themselves save for
a single fierce will for rapine and pillage, composed of the
sons of middle-aged Quartermaster lieutenants and Army
sutlers and contractors in military blankets and shoes and
transport mules, who followed the battles they themselves
had not fought and inherited the conquest they themselves
had not helped to gain, sanctioned and protected even if
not blessed, and left their bones and in another generation
would be engaged in a fierce economic competition of
small sloven farms with the black men they were supposed
to have freed and the white descendants of fathers who had
owned no slaves anyway whom they were supposed to
have disinherited and in the third generation would be
back once more in the little lost county seats as barbers
and garage mechanics and deputy sheriffs and mill- and
gin-hands and power-plant firemen, leading,' first in mufti

The Bear 279

then later in an actual formalised regalia of hooded sheets
and passwords and fiery Christian symbols, lynching mobs
against the race their ancestors had come to save: and of
all that other nameless horde of speculators in human mis-
ery, manipulators of money and politics and land, who fol-
low catastrophe and are their own protection as grass-
hoppers are and need no blessing and sweat no plow or
axe-helve and batten and vanish and leave no bones, just
as they derived apparently from no ancestry, no mortal
flesh, no act even of passion or even of lust: and the Jew
who came without protection too since after two thousand
years he had got out of the habit of being or needing it, and
solitary, without even the solidarity of the locusts and in
this a sort of courage since he had come thinking not in
terms of simple pillage but in terms of his great-grandchil-
dren, seeking yet some place to establish them to endure
even though forever alien: and Unblessed: a pariah about
the face of the Western earth which twenty centuries later
was still taking revenge on him for the fairy tale with
which he had conquered it. McCaslin had actually seen it,
and the boy even at almost eighty would never be able to
distinguish certainly between what he had seen and what
had been told him: a lightless and gutted and empty land
where women crouched with the huddled children behind
locked doors and men armed in sheets and masks rode the
silent roads and the bodies of white and black both, vio
tims not so much of hate as of desperation and despair,
swung from lonely limbs: and men shot dead in polling-
booths with the still wet pen in one hand and the unblotted
ballot in the other: and a United States marshal in Jeffer-
son who signed his official papers with a crude cross, an
ex-slave called Sickymo, not at all because his ex-owner
was a doctor and apothecary but because, still a slave, he
would steal his master’s grain alcohol and dilate it with

280 WILLIAM FAULKNER

water and peddle it in pint bottles from a cache beneath
the roots of a big sycamore tree behind the drug store, who
had attained his high office because his half-white sister
was the concubine of the Federal A.PJM.: and this time
McCaslin did not even say Look but merely lifted one
hand, not even pointing, not even specifically toward the
shelf of ledgers but toward the desk, toward the comer
where it sat beside the scuffed patch on the floor where
two decades of heavy shoes had stood while the white naan
at the desk added and multiplied and subtracted. And
again he did not need to look because he had seen this
himself and, twenty-three years after the Surrender and
twenty-four after the Proclamation, was still watching it:
the ledgers, new ones now and filled rapidly, succeeding
one another rapidly and containing more names than old
Carothers or even his father and Uncle Buddy had ever
dreamed of; new names and new faces to go with them,
among which the old names and faces that even his
father and uncle would have recognised, were lost, van-
ished — Tomey’s Terrel dead, and even the tragic and mis-
cast Percival Brownlee, who couldn’t keep books and
couldn’t farm either, found his true niche at last, reap-
peared in 1862 during the boy’s father’s absence and had
apparently been living on the plantation for at least a
month before his uncle found out about it, conducting im-
promptu revival meetings among Negroes, preaching and
leading the singing also in his high sweet true soprano
voice, and disappeared again on foot and at top speed, not
behind but ahead of a body of raiding Federal horse and
reappeared for the third and last time in the entourage of
a travelling Army paymaster, the two of them passing
through Jefferson in a surrey at the exact moment when
the boy’s father (it was 1866 ) also happened to be cross-
ing the Square, the surrey and its occupants traversing

The Bear 281

rapidly that quiet and bucolic scene and even in that fleet*
ing moment and to others besides the boy's father giving an
illusion of flight and illicit holiday like a man on an excur-
sion during his wife’s absence with his wife’s personal
maid, until Brownlee glanced up and saw his late co-
master and gave him one defiant female glance and then
broke again, leaped from the surrey and disappeared this
time for good and it was only by chance that McCaslin,
twenty years later, heard of him again, an old man now
and qpxite fat, as the well-to-do proprietor of a select New
Orleans brothel; and Tennie’s Jim gone, nobody knew
where, and Fonsiba in Arkansas with her three dollars
each month and the scholar-husband with his lenseless
spectacles and frock coat and his plans for the spring; and
only Lucas was left, the baby, the last save himself of old
Carothers* doomed and fatal blood which in the male
derivation seemed to destroy all it touched, and even he
was repudiating and at least hoping to escape it — Lucas,
the boy of fourteen whose name would not even appear for
six years yet among those rapid pages In the bindings new
and dustless too since McCaslin lifted them down daily
now to write into them the continuation of that record
which two hundred years had not been enough to complete
«nd another hundred would not be enough to discharge;
that chronicle which was a whole land in miniature, which
multiplied and compounded was the entire South, twenty-*
three years after surrender and twenty-four from eman-
cipation— that slow trickle of molasses and meal and meat,
of shoes and straw hats and overalls, of plowlines and col-
lars and heel-bolts and buekheads and clevises, which re-
turned each fall as cotton— the two threads frail as truth
and impalpable as equators yet cable-strong to bind for
life them who made the cotton to the land their sweat fell
on: and he

28 * WILLIAM FAULKNER

*Yes. Binding them for a while yet, a little while yet.
Through and beyond that life and maybe through and
beyond the life of that life's sons and maybe even through
and beyond that of the sons of those sons. But not always,
because they will endure. They will outlast us because
they are -— 9 It was not a pause, barely a falter even, pos-
sibly appreciable only to himself, as if he couldn't speak
even to McCaslin, even to explain his repudiation, that
which to him too, even in the act of escaping (and maybe
this was the reality and the truth of his need to escape), was
heresy: so that even in escaping he was taking with him
more of that evil and unregenerate old man who could
summon, because she was his property, a human being be-
cause she was old enough and female, to his widower’s
house and get a child on her and then dismiss her because
she was of an inferior race, and then bequeath a thousand
dollars to the infant because he would be dead then and
wouldn’t have to pay it, than even he had feared. ‘Yes. He
didn’t want to. He had to. Because they will endure. They
are better than we are. Stronger than we are. Their vices
are vices aped from white men or that white men and
bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemper-
ance and evasion — not laziness: evasion: of what white
men had set them to, not for their aggrandisement or even
comfort but his own — 9 and McCaslin

•All right Go on: Promiscuity. Violence. Instability and
lack of control. Inability to distinguish between mine and
thine — 9 and he

•How distinguish, when for two hundred years mine did
not even exist for them ? 9 and McCaslin

•AH right Go on. And their virtues — 9 and he
*Yes. Their own. Endurance — 9 and McCaslin
*So have mules : 9 and he

•—and pity and tolerance and forbearance and fidelity
and love of children — 9 and McCaslin

283

The Bear

‘So have dogs:* and he

* — whether their own or not or black or not And more:
what they got not only not from white people but not
even despite white people because they had it already
from die old free fathers a longer time free than us be*
cause we have never been free — * and it was in McCaslin’s
eyes too, he had only to look at McCaslin’s eyes and it
was there, that summer twilight seven years ago, almost a
week after they had returned from the camp before he
discovered that Sam Fathers had told McCaslin: an old
bear, fierce and ruthless not just to stay alive but ruthless
with the fierce pride of liberty and freedom, jealous and
proud enough of liberty and freedom to see it threatened
not with fear nor even alarm but almost with joy, seeming
deliberately to put it into jeopardy in order to savor it and
keep his old strong bones and flesh supple and quick to
defend and preserve it; an old man, son of a Negro slave
and an Indian king, inheritor on the one hand of the long
chronicle of a people who had learned humility through
suffering and learned pride through the endurance which
survived the suffering, and on the other side the chronicle
of a people even longer in the land than the first, yet who
now existed there only in the solitary brotherhood of an
old and childless Negro’s alien blood and the wild and
invincible spirit of an old bear; a boy who wished to learn
humility and pride in order to become skillful and worthy
in the woods but found himself becoming so skillful so
fast that he feared he would never become worthy because
he had not learned humility and pride though he had tried,
until one day an old man who could not have defined either
led him as though by the hand to where an old bear and
a little mongrel dog showed him that, by possessing one
thing other, he would possess them both; and a little dog,
nameless and mongrel and many-fathered, grown yet
weighing less than six pounds, who couldn’t he danger*

284 WILLIAM FAULKNER

011s because there was nothing anywhere much smaller,
not fierce because that would have been called just noise,
not humble because it was already too near the ground to
genuflect, and not proud because it would not have been
close enough for anyone to discern what was casting that
shadow, and which didn’t even know it was not going to
heaven since they had already decided it had no immortal
soul, so that all it could be was brave even though they
would probably call that too just noise. ‘And you didn't
shoot / McCaslin said . ‘How close were you V

7 dont know / he said . ‘There was a big wood tick just
inside his off hind leg . I saw that . But l didn't have the
gun then 9

‘But you didn't shoot when you had the gun / McCaslin
said . ‘ Why V But McCaslin didn't wait ; rising and crossing
the room , across the pelt of the bear he had killed two
years ago and the bigger one McCaslin had killed before
he was born , to the bookcase beneath the mounted head
of his first buck, and returned with the book and sat down
again and opened it. ‘Listen , 9 he scad . He read the five
stanzas aloud and closed the book on his finger and looked
up. 4 AU right , 9 he said . ‘Listen , 9 and read again, but only
one stanza this time and closed the book and laid it on the
table . ‘She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss , 9
McCaslin said : ‘ Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair /

‘He's talking about a girl , 9 he said .

4 He had to talk about something/ McCaslin said. Then
he scud, * He was talking about truth. Truth is one. It
doesn't change. It covers all things which touch the heart
— honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and
love. Do you see now ? 9 He didn 9 t know. Somehow it had
seemed simpler than that, simpler than somebody talking
in a book about a young man and a girl he would never
need to grieve over because he could never approach any

The Bear 285

nearer and would never have to get any further away . He
had heard about an old bear and finally got big enough to
hunt it and he hunted it four years and at last met it with
a gun in his hands and he didrCt shoot. Because a little dog
—But he could have shot long before the fyce covered the
twenty yards to where the bear waited, and Sam Fathers
could have shot at any time during the interminable minute
while Old Ben stood on his hind legs over them . • • • He
ceased . McCaslin watched him, still speaking, the voice ,
the words as quiet as the twilight itself was: ‘Courage and
honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and of liberty.
They all touch the heart, and what the heart holds to be-
comes truth, as far as we know truth. Do you see now V
and he could still hear them, intact in this twilight as in
that one seven years ago, no louder still because they did
not need to be because they would endure: and he had
only to look at McCaslin's eyes beyond the thin and bitter
s m ili n g, the faint lip-lift which would have had to be
called smiling — his kinsman, his father almost, who had
been bom too late into the old time and too soon for the
new, the two of them juxtaposed and alien now to each
other against their ravaged patrimony, the dark and rav-
aged fatherland still prone and panting from its etherless
operation:

4 Habet then. — So this land is, indubitably, of and by
itself cursed:* and he

‘Cursed:* and again McCaslin merely lifted one hand,
not even speaking and not even toward the ledgers: so that,
as the stereopticon condenses into one instantaneous field
the myriad minutia of its scope, so did that slight and
rapid gesture establish in the small cramped and cluttered
twilit room not only the ledgers but the whole plantation
in its mazed and intricate entirety — the land, the fields
and what they represented in terms of cotton ginned and

286 WILLIAM FAULKNER

sold, the men and women whom they fed and clothed and
even paid a little cash money at Christmas-time in return
for the labor which planted and raised and picked and
ginned the cotton, the machinery and mules and gear with
which they raised it and their cost and upkeep and re-
placement — that whole edifice intricate and complex and
founded upon injustice and erected by ruthless rapacity
and carried on even yet with at times downright savagery
not only to the human beings but the valuable animals too,
yet solvent and efficient and, more than that: not only still
intact but enlarged, increased; brought still intact by Mo
Caslin, himself little more than a child then, through and
out of the debacle and chaos of twenty years ago where
hardly one in ten survived, and enlarged and increased
and would continue so, solvent and efficient and intact and
still increasing so long as McCaslin and his McCasIin suc-
cessors lasted, even though their surnames might not even
be Edmonds then: and he: ‘Habet too. Because that’s- it:
not the land, but us. Not only the blood, but the name
too; not only its color but its designation: Edmonds, white,
but, a female line, could have no other but the name his
father bore; Beauchamp, the elder line and the male one,
but, black, could have had any name he liked and no man
would have cared, except the name his father bore who
had no name — * and McCaslin

‘And since I know too what you know I will say now,
once more let me say it: And one other, and in the third
generation too, and the male, the eldest, the direct and sole
and white and still McCaslin even, father to son to son — *
and he

*1 am free:* and this time McCaslin did not even ges-
ture, no inference of fading pages, no postulation of the
stereoptic whole, but the frail and iron thread strong as
truth and impervious as evil and longer than life itself

The Bear 287

and reaching beyond record and patrimony both to join
him with the lusts and passions, the hopes and dreams and
griefs, of bones whose names while still fleshed and capable
even old Carothers’ grandfather had never heard; and he:
‘And of that too:* and McCaslin

‘Chosen, I suppose (I will concede it), out of all your
time by Him as you say Buck and Buddy were from theirs*
And it took Him a bear and an old man and four years
just for you. And it took you fourteen years to reach that
point and about that many, maybe more, for Old Ben, and
more than seventy for Sam Fathers. And you are just one.
How long then? How long?' and he

‘It will be long. I have never said otherwise. But it will
be all right because they will endure — * and McCaslin
‘And anyway, you will be free. — No, not now nor ever,
we from them nor they from us. So I repudiate too. I would
deny even if I knew it were true. I would have to. Even
you can see that I could do no else. I am what I am; I will
be always what I was born and have always been. And
more than me. More than me, just as there were more
than Buck and Buddy in what you called His first plan
which failed: * and he

‘And more than me:* and McCaslin
*No. Not even you. Because mark. You said how on that
instant when Ikkemotubbe realised that he could sell the
land to Grandfather, it ceased forever to have been his.
All right; go on: Then it belonged to Sam Fathers, old
Jkkemotubbe’s son. And who inherited from Sam Fathers,
if not you? co-heir perhaps with Boon, if not of his life
maybe, at least of his quitting it?* and he

*Yes. Sam Fathers set me free.* And Isaac McCaslin, not
yet Uncle Ike, a long time yet before he would be uncle
to half a county and still father to none, living in one
small cramped fireless rented room in a Jefferson boarding-

288 WILLIAM FAULKNER

house where petit juries were domiciled during court terms
and itinerant horse- and mule-traders stayed, with his kit
of brand-new carpenter’s tools and the shotgun McCaslin
had given him with his name engraved in silver and old
General Compscra’s compass (and, when the General died,
his silver-mounted horn too) and the iron cot and mattress
and the blankets which he would take each fall into the
woods for more than sixty years and the bright tin coffee-
pot

there had been a legacy, from his Uncle Hubert Beau-
champ, his godfather, that bluff burly roaring childlike
man from whom Uncle Buddy had won Tomey’s Terrel’s
wife Tennie in the poker-game in 1859 — ‘possible strait
against three Treys in sigt. Not called’ — ; no pale sentence
or paragraph scrawled in cringing fear of death by a weak
and trembling hand as a last desperate sop flung backward
at retribution, but a Legacy, a Thing, possessing weight to
the hand and bulk to the eye and even audible: a silver
cup filled with gold pieces and wrapped in burlap and
sealed with his godfather’s ring in the hot wax, which
(intact still) even before his Uncle Hubert's death and
long before his own majority, when it would be his, had
become not only a legend but one of the family lares.
After his father’s and his Uncle Hubert’s sister’s marriage
they moved back into the big house, the tremendous cav-
ern which old Carothers had started and never finished,
cleared the remaining Negroes out of it and with his
mother’s dowry completed it, at least the rest of the win-
dows and doors, and moved into it, all of them save Unde
Buddy who declined to leave the cabin he and his twin
had built, the move being the bride’s notion and more than
just a notion and none ever to know if she really wanted to
live in the big house or if she knew beforehand that Uncle
Buddy would refuse to move: and two weeks after his
birth in 1867, the first time he and his mother came down

The Bear 289

stairs, one night and the silver cup sitting on the cleared
dining-room table beneath the bright lamp and while his
mother and his father and McCaslin and Tennie (his
nurse: carrying him) — all of them again but Unde Buddy
—watched, his Uncle Hubert rang one by one into the
cup the bright and glinting mintage and wrapped it into
the burlap envelope and heated the wax and sealed it and
carried it back home with him where he lived alone now
without even his sister either to hold him down as Mo
Caslin said or to try to raise him up as Uncle Buddy said,
and (dark times then in Mississippi) Uncle Buddy said
most of the niggers gone and the ones that didn’t go even
Hub Beauchamp could not have wanted: but the dogs re-
mained and Uncle Buddy said Beauchamp fiddled while
Nero fox-hunted

they would go and see it there; at last his mother would
prevail and they would depart in the surrey, once more all
save Uncle Buddy and McCaslin to keep Uncle Buddy
company until one winter Uncle Buddy began to fail and
from then on it was himself, beginning to remember now,
and his mother and Tennie and Tomey’s Terrel to drive:
the twenty-two miles into the next county, the twin gate-
posts on one of which McCaslin could remember the half-
grown boy blowing a fox-horn at breakfast dinner and sup-
per-time and jumping down to open to any passer who
happened to hear it but where there were no gates at all
now, the shabby and overgrown entrance to what his
mother still insisted that people call Warwick because her
brother was if truth but triumphed and justice but pre-
vailed the rightful earl of it, the paintless house which out-
wardly did not change but which on the inside seemed
each time larger because he was too little to realise then
that there was less and less in it of the fine furnishings, the
rosewood and mahogany and walnut which for him had
never existed anywhere anyway save in his mother’s tear-

29O WILLIAM FAULKNER

ful lamentations and the occasional piece small enough to
be roped somehow onto the rear or the top of the carriage
on their return (And he remembered this, he had seen it:
an instant, a flash, his mother’s soprano ‘Even my dress!
Even my dress!’ loud and outraged in the barren unswept
hall; a face young and female and even lighter in color
than Tomey’s Terrel’s for an instant in a closing door; a
swirl, a glimpse of the silk gown and the flick and glint of
an earring: an apparition rapid and tawdry and illicit yet
somehow even to the child, the infant still almost, breath*
less and exciting and evocative: as though, like two limpid
and pellucid streams meeting, the child which he still was
had made serene and absolute and perfect rapport and
contact through that glimpsed nameless illicit hybrid female
flesh with the boy which had existed at that stage of in-
violable and immortal adolescence in his uncle for almost
sixty years; the dress, the face, the ear-rings gone in that
same aghast flash and his uncle’s voice: ‘She’s my cook!
She’s my new cookl I had to have a cook, didn’t I?’ then
the uncle himself, the face alarmed and aghast too yet still
innocently and somehow even indomitably of a boy, they
retreating in their turn now, back to the front gallery, and
his uncle again, pained and still amazed, in a sort of des-
perate resurgence if not of courage at least of self-assertion:
‘They’re free nowl They’re folks too just like we arel’ and
his mother: ‘That’s why! That’s why! My mother’s house!
Defiled! Defiled!’ and his uncle: ‘Damn it, Sibbey, at least
give her time to pack her grip : 9 then over, finished, the
loud uproar and all, himself and Tennie and he remem-
bered Tennie’s. inscrutable face at the broken shutterless
window of the bare room which had once been the parlor
while they watched, hurrying down the lane at a stumbling
trot, the routed compounder of his uncle’s uxory: the back,
the nameless face which he had seen only for a moment,
the once-hooped dress ballooning and flapping below a

The Bear 291

man’s overcoat, the worn heavy carpet-bag jouncing and
banging against her knee, routed and in retreat true enough
and in the empty lane solitary young-looking and forlorn
yet withal still exciting and evocative and wearing still the
silken banner captured inside the very citadel of respect*
ability, and unforgettable.)

the cup, the sealed inscrutable burlap, sitting on the
shelf in the locked closet. Uncle Hubert unlocking the
door and lifting it down and passing it from hand to hand:
his mother, his father, McCaslin and even Tennie, insist-
ing that each take it in turn and heft it for weight and
shake it again to prove the sound. Uncle Hubert himself
standing spraddled before the cold unswept hearth in which
the very bricks themselves were crumbling into a litter of
soot and dust and mortar and the droppings of chimney-
sweeps, still roaring and still innocent and still indomitable:
and for a long time he believed nobody but himself had
noticed that his uncle now put the cup only into his hands,
unlocked the door and lifted it down and put it into his
hands and stood over him until he had shaken it obe-
diently until it sounded then took it from him and locked
it back into the closet before anyone else could have of-
fered to touch it, and even later, when competent not only
to remember but to rationalise, he could not say what it
was or even if it had been anything because the parcel
was still heavy and still rattled, not even when. Uncle
Buddy dead and his father, at last and after almost seventy-
five years in bed after the sun rose, said: ‘Go get that damn
cup. Bring that damn Hub Beauchamp too if you have
to: 9 because it still rattled though his uncle no longer put
it even into his hands now but carried it himself from
one to the other, his mother, McCaslin, Tennie, shaking
it before each in turn, saying: ‘Hear it? Hear it? 9 his face
still innocent, not quite baffled but only amazed and not
very amazed and still indomitable: and, his father and

29 2 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Uncle Buddy both gone now, one day without reason or
any warning the almost completely empty house in which
his uncle and Tennie’s ancient and quarrelsome great-
grandfather (who claimed to have seen Lafayette and
McCaslin said in another ten years would be remembering
God) lived, cooked and slept in one single room, burst
into peaceful conflagration, a tranquil instantaneous sourco-
less unanimity of combustion, walls floors and roof: at
sunup it stood where his uncle’s father had built it sixty
years ago, at sundown the four blackened and smokeless
chimneys rose from a light white powder of ashes and a
few charred ends of planks which did not even appear to
have been very hot: and out of the last of evening, the last
one of the twenty-two miles, on the old white mare which
was the last of that stable which McCaslin remembered,
the two old men riding double up to the sister’s door, the
one wearing his fox horn on its braided deerhide thong
and the other carrying the burlap parcel wrapped in a
shirt, the tawny wax-daubed shapeless lump sitting again
and on an almost identical shelf and his uncle holding the
half-opened door now, his hand not only on the knob but
one foot against it and the key waiting in the other hand,
the face urgent and still not baffled but still and even in-
domitably not very amazed and himself standing in the
half-opened door looking quietly up at the burlap shape
become almost three times its original height and a good
half less than its original thickness and turning away and
he would remember not his mother’s look this time nor yet
Tennie’s inscrutable expression but McCaslin’s dark and
aquiline face grave insufferable and bemused: then one
night they waked him and fetched him still half-asleep into
the lamp light, the smell of medicine which was familiar
by now in that room and the smell of something else which
he had not smelled before and knew at once and would

The Bear 293

never forget, the pillow, the worn and ravaged face from
which looked out still the boy innocent and immortal and
amazed and urgent, looking at him and trying to tell him
until McCaslin moved and leaned over the bed and drew
from the top of the night shirt the big iron key on the greasy
cord which suspended it, the eyes saying Yes Yes Yes now,
and cut the cord and unlocked the closet and brought the
parcel to the bed, the eyes still trying to tell him even when
he took the parcel so that was still not it, the hands still cling-
ing to the parcel even while relinquishing it, the eyes more
urgent than ever trying to tell him but they never did;
and he was ten and his mother was dead too and McCas-
lin said, *You are almost halfway now. You might as well
open it:* and he: *No. He said twenty-one:’ and he was
twenty-one and McCaslin shifted the bright lamp to the
center of the cleared dining-room.table and set the parcel
beside it and laid his open knife beside the parcel and stood
back with that expression of old grave intolerant and re-
pudiating and he lifted it, the burlap lump which fifteen
years ago had changed its shape completely overnight,
which shaken gave forth a thin weightless not-quite-musical
curiously muffled clatter, the bright knife-blade hunting
amid the mazed intricacy of string, the knobby gouts of
wax bearing his uncle’s Beauchamp seal rattling onto the
table’s polished top and, standing amid the collapse of bur-
lap folds, the unstained tin coffee-pot still brand new, the
handful of copper coins and now he knew what had given
them the muffled sound: a collection of minutely folded
scraps of paper sufficient almost for a rat’s nest, of good
linen bond, of the crude ruled paper such as Negroes use,
of raggedly tom ledger-pages and the margins of news-
papers and once die paper label from a new pair of over-
alls, all dated and all signed, beginning with the first one
not six m o n ths after they had watched him seal the sil-

294 WILLIAM FAULKNER

ver cup into the burlap on this same table in this same
room by the light even of this same lamp almost twenty-
one years ago:

/ owe my Nephew Isaac Beauchamp McCaslin five
(5) pieces Gold which LO.U constitues My note of
hand with Interest at 5 percent .

Hubert Fitz-Hubert Beauchamp
at Warwick 27 Nov 1867

and he: ‘Anyway he called it Warwick:* once at least, even
if no more. But there was more:

Isaac 24 Dec 1867 LO.U . 2 pieces Gold HJFh.B.
I.O.U . Isaac 1 piece Gold 1 Jan 1868 HJFh.B.

then five again then three then one then one then a long
time and what dream, what dreamed splendid recoup, not
of any injury or betrayal of trust because it had been merely
a loan: nay, a partnership:

LO.U . Beauchamp McCaslin or his heirs twenty-five
(25) pieces Gold This & All preceeding constituting
My notes of hand at twenty (20) percentum com-
pounded annually. This date of 19th January 1873

Beauchamp

no location save that In time and signed by the single not
name but word as the old proud earl himself might have
scrawled Nevile: and that made forty-three and he could
not remember himself of course but the legend bad it at
fifty, which balanced: one: then one: then one: then one
and then the last three and then the last chit, dated after
he came to live in the house with them and written in the
shaky hand not of a beaten did man because he had never
been beaten to know it but of a tired old man maybe and
even at that tired only on the outside and still indomitable.

The Bear 295

die simplicity of the last one the simplicity not of resigna-
tion but merely of amazement, like a simple comment or
remark, and not very much of that:

One diver cup. Hubert Beauchamp

and McCaslin: ‘So you have plenty of coppers anyway.
But they are still not old enough yet to be either rarities or
heirlooms. So you will have to take the money:’ except that
he didn’t hear McCaslin, standing quietly beside the table
and looking peacefully at the coffee-pot and the pot sitting
one night later on the mantel above what was not even a
fireplace in the little cramped icelike room in Jefferson as
McCaslin tossed the folded banknotes onto the bed and,
still standing (there was nowhere to sit save on the bed),
did not even remove his hat and overcoat: and he
‘As a loan. From you. This once:’ and McCaslin
•You cant. I have no money that I can lend to you. And
you will have to go to the bank and get it next month be-
cause I wont bring it to you;’ and he could not hear Mo
Caslin now either, looking peacefully at McCaslin, his
kinsman, his father almost yet no kin now as, at the last,
even fathers and sons are no kin: and he

‘It’s seventeen miles, horseback and in the cold. Wo
could both sleep here:’ and McCaslin

‘Why should I sleep here in my house when you wont
sleep yonder in yours?’ and gone, and he looking at the
bright rustless unstained till and thinking and not for the
first rime how much it takes to compound a man (Isaac
McCaslin for instance) and of the devious intricate choos-
ing yet unerring path that man’s (Isaac McCaslin’s for
instance) spirit takes among all that mass to make him at
last what he is to be, not only to the astonishment of them
(the ones who sired the McCaslin who sired his father and
Uncle Buddy and their sister, and the ones who sired the

296 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Beauchamp who sired his Uncle Hubert and his Uncle
Hubert’s sister) who believed they had shaped him, but to
Isaac McCaslin too

as a loan and used it though he would not have had to:
Major de Spain offered him a room in his house as long as
he wanted it and asked nor would ever ask any question,
and old General Compson more than that, to take him into
his own room, to sleep in half of his own bed and more
than Major de Spain because he told him baldly why: ‘You
sleep with me and before this winter is out. I’ll know the
reason. You’ll tell me. Because I dont believe you just quit.
It looks like you just quit but I have watched you in the
woods too much and I dont believe you just quit even if it
does look damn like it:’ using it as a loan, paid his board
and rent for a month and bought the tools, not simply be-
cause he was good with his hands because he had intended
to use his hands and it could have been with horses, and
not in mere static and hopeful emulation of the Nazarene
as the young gambler buys a spotted shirt because the old
gambler won in one yesterday, but (without the arrogance
of false humility and without the false humbleness of pride,
who intended to earn his bread, didn’t especially want to
earn it but had to earn it and for more than just bread)
because if the Nazar ene had found carpentering good for
the life and ends He had assumed and elected to serve, it
would be all right too for Isaac McCaslin even though
Isaac McCaslin’s ends, although simple enough in their
apparent motivation, were and would be always incompre-
hensible to him, and his life, invincible enough in its needs,
if he could have helped himself, not being the Nazarene,
he would not have chosen it: and paid it back. He had for-
gotten the thirty dollars which McCaslin would put into
the bank in his name each month, fetched it in to him
and flung it onto the bed that first one time but no more;
he had a partner now or rather he was the partner: a

The Bear 297

blasphemous profane clever old dipsomaniac who had built
blockade-runners in Charleston in *62 and ’3 and had been
a ship’s carpenter since and appeared in Jefferson two years
ago nobody knew from where nor why and spent a good
part of his time since recovering from delirium tremens in
the jail; they had put a new roof on the stable of the bank’s
president and (the old man in jail again still celebrating
that job) he went to the bank to collect for it and the presi-
dent said, *1 should borrow from you instead of paying
you:’ and it had been seven months now and he remem-
bered for the first time, two-hundred-and-ten dollars, and
this was the first job of any size and when he left the bank
the account stood at two-twenty, two-forty to balance, only
twenty dollars more to go, then it did balance thongh by
then the total had increased to three hundred and thirty
and he said, *1 will transfer it now:’ and the president said,
‘I cant do that. McCaslin told me not to. Haven’t you got
another initial you could use and open another account?’
but that was all right, the coins the silver and the bills as
they accumulated knotted into a handkerchief and the
coffee-pot wrapped in an old shirt as when Tennie’s great-
grandfather had fetched it from Warwick eighteen years
ago, in the bottom of the iron-bound trunk which old Caro-
thers had brought from Carolina and his landlady said,
*Not even a lockl And you dont even lock your door, not
even when you leave!’ and himself looking at her as peace-
fully as he had looked at McCaslin that first night in this
same room, no kin to him at all yet more than kin as those
who serve you even for pay are your kin and those who
injure you are more than brother or wife

and had the wife now, got the old man out of jail and
fetched him to the rented room and sobered him by superior
strength, did not even remove his own shoes for twenty-
four hours, got him up and got food into him and they
built the bam this time from the ground up and he mar*

298 WILLIAM FAULKNER

ried her: an only child, a small girl yet curiously bigger
than she seemed at first, solider perhaps, with dark eyes
and a passionate heart-shaped face, who had time even on
that farm to watch most of the day while he sawed timbers
to the old man’s measurements: and she: Tapa told me
about you. That farm is really yours, isn’t it?’ and he
‘And McCaslin’s: ’ and she
‘Was there a will leaving half of it to him?’ and he
•There didn’t need to be a will. His grandmother was
my father’s sister. We were the same as brothers:' and she
*You are the same as second cousins and that’s all you
ever will be. But I dont suppose it matters:’ and they were
married, they were married and it was the new country,
his heritage too as it was the heritage of all, out of the
earth, beyond the earth yet of the earth because his too
was of the earth’s long chronicle, his too because each must
share with another in order to come into it and in the
sharing they become one: for that while, one: for that
little while at least, one: indivisible, that while at least ir-
revocable and unrecoverable, living in a rented room still
but for just a little while and that room wall-less and top-
less and floorless in glory for him to leave each morning and
return to at night; her father already owned the lot in
town and furnished the material and he and his partner
would build it, her dowry from one: her wedding-present
from three, she not to know it until the bungalow was
finished and ready to be moved into and he never to know
who told her, not her father and not his partner and not
even in drink though for a while he believed that, himself
coming home from work and just time to wash and rest a
moment before going down to supper, entering no rented
cubicle since it would still partake of glory even after they
would have grown old and lost it: and he saw her face
then, just before she spoke: ‘Sit down:’ the two of them
sitting on the bed’s edge, not even touching yet, her face

The Bear 299

strained and terrible, her voice a passionate and expiring
whisper of immeasurable promise: ‘I love you. You know
I love you. When are we going to move?’ and he

*1 didn't — I didn’t know — Who told you — ’ the hot fierce
palm clapped over his mouth, crushing his lips into his
teeth, the fierce curve of fingers digging into his cheek and
only the palm slacked off enough for him to answer:

‘The farm. Our farm. Your farm : ’ and he
T — * then the hand again, finger and palm, the whole
enveloping weight of her although she still was not touch-
ing him save the hand, the voice: ‘No! No!’ and the fingers
themselves seeming to follow through the cheek the im-
pulse to speech as it died in his mouth, then the whisper,
the breath again, of love and of incredible promise, the
palm slackening again to let him answer:

•When?’ and he

T — * then she was gone, the hand too, standing, her back
to him and her head bent, the voice so calm now that for
an instant it seemed no voice of hers that he ever remem-
bered: ‘Stand up and turn your back and shut your eyes:*
and repeated before he understood and stood himself with
his eyes shut and heard the bell ring for supper below stairs
and die calm voice again: ‘Lock the door:’ and he did so
and leaned his forehead against the cold wood, his eyes
closed, hearing his heart and the sound he had begun to
hear before he moved until it ceased and the bell rang again
below stairs and he knew it was for them this time and ho
heard the bed and turned and he had never seen her naked
before, he had asked her to once, and why: that he wanted
to see her naked because he loved her and he wanted to
see her looking at him naked because he loved her but
after that he never mentioned it again, even turning his
face when she put the nightgown on over her dress to
undress at night and putting the dress on over the gown
to remove it in the morning and she would not let him get

300 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Into bed beside her until the lamp was out and even in
the heat of summer she would draw the sheet up over them
both before she would let him turn to her: and the land-
lady came up the stairs up the hall and rapped on the door
and then called their names but she didn’t move, lying still
on the bed outside the covers, her face turned away on the
pillow, listening to nothing, thinking of nothing, not of him
anyway he thought then the landlady went away an d she
said, Take off your clothes:’ her head still turned away,
.looking at nothing, thinking of nothing, waiting for noth-
ing, not even him, her hand moving as though with voli-
tion and vision of its own, catching his wrist at the exact
moment when he paused beside the bed so that he never
paused but merely changed the direction of moving, down-
ward now, the hand drawing him and she moved at last,
shifted, a movement one single complete inherent not
practice and one time older than man, looking at him now,
drawing him still downward with the one hand down and
down and he neither saw nor felt it shift, palm flat against
his chest now and holding him away with the same ap-
parent lack of any effort or any need for strength, and not
looking at him now, she didn’t need to, the chaste woman,
the wife, already looked upon all the men who ever rutted
and now her whole body had changed, altered, he had
never seen it but once and now it was not even the one he
had seen but composite of all woman-flesh since man that
ever of its own will reclined on its back and opened, and
out of it somewhere, without any movement of lips even,
the dying and invincible whisper: Tromise:’ and he

•Promise?’

The farm.’ He moved. He had moved, the hand shifting
from his chest once more to his wrist, grasping it, the arm
still lax and only the light increasing pressure of the Angers
as though arm and hand were a piece of wire cable with

The Bear 301

one looped end, only the hand tightening a* he pulled
against it ‘No/ he said. ‘No;* and she was not looking at
him still but not like the other but still the hand: ‘No,
I tell you. I wont I cant Never:* and still the hand and
he said, for the last time, he tried to speak dearly and he
knew it was still gently and he thought She already knows
more than 1 with all the man-listening in camps where
there was nothing to read ever even heard of. They are
bom already bored with what a boy approaches only at
fourteen and fifteen with blundering and aghast trembling :
‘I cant Not ever. Remember:’ and still the steady and in~
vincible band and he said Yes and he thought She is lost.
She was bom lost . We were all bom lost then he stopped
thinking and even saying Yes, it was like nothing he had
ever dreamed, let alone heard in mere man-talking until
after a no-time he returned and lay spent on the insatiate
immemorial beach and again with a movement one time
more older than man she turned and freed herself and on
their wedding night she had cried and he drought she was
crying now at first into the tossed and wadded pillow, the
voice coming from somewhere between the pillow and the
cachinnation: ‘And that’s alL That’s all from me. If this
dont get you that son you talk about it wont be mine:*
lying on her side, her back to the empty rented room,
laughing and laughing

5

Be went back to the camp one mote time before the
lumber company moved in and began to cut the timber.
Major de Spain himself never saw it again. But he m ade
them welcome to use the house and hunt the land when-

302 WILLIAM FAULKNER

ever they liked, and in the winter foDowing the last hunt
when Sam Fathers and Lion died, General Compson and
Walter Ewell invented a plan to corporate themselves, the
old group, into a club and lease the camp and the hunting
privileges of the woods — an invention doubtless of the
somewhat childish old General but actually worthy of
Boon Hogganbeck himself. Even the boy, listening, recog-
nised it for the subterfuge it was: to change the leopard’s
spots when they could not alter the leopard, a baseless and
illusory hope to which even McCaslin seemed to subscribe
for a while, that once they had persuaded Major de Spain
to return to the camp he might revoke himself, which even
the boy knew he would not do. And he did not. The boy
never knew what occurred when Major de Spain declined.
He was not present when the subject was broached and
McCaslin never told him. But when June came and the
time for the double birthday celebration there was no men-
tion of it and when November came no one spoke of using
Major de Spain’s house and he never knew whether or
not Major de Spain knew they were going on the hunt
though without doubt old Ash probably told him: he and
McCaslin and General Compson (and that one was the
General’s last hunt too) and Walter and Boon and Tennie’s
Jim and old Ash loaded two wagons and drove two day:
and almost forty miles beyond any country the boy had
ever seen before and lived in tents for the two weeks. And
the next spring they heard (not from Major de Spain)
that he had sold the timber-rights to a Memphis lumber
company and in June the boy came to town with McCaslin
one Saturday and went to Major de Spain’s office — the big,
airy, book-lined second-storey room with windows at one
end opening upon the shabby hinder purlieus of stores
and at the other a door giving onto the railed balcony
above the Square, with its curtained alcove where sat a ce»

The Bear 303

dar water-bucket and a sugar-bowl and spoon and tumbler
and a wicker-covered demijohn of whiskey, and the bam-
boo-and-paper punkah swinging back and forth above the
desk while old Ash in a tilted chair beside the entrance
pulled the cord.

“Of course,” Major de Spain said. “Ash will probably
like to get off in the woods himself for a while, where he
wont have to eat Daisy’s cooking. Complain about it, any-
way. Are you going to take anybody with you?' 1

“No, sir,” he said. “I thought that maybe Boon — ” For
six months now Boon had been town marshal at Hoke’s;
Major de Spain had compounded with the lumber com-
pany — or perhaps compromised was closer, since it was the
lumber company who had decided that Boon might bo
better as a town marshal than head of a logging gang.

“Yes,” Major de Spain said. “I’ll wire him today. Ho
can meet you at Hoke’s. I’ll send Ash on by the train and
they can take some food in and all you will have to do will
be to mount your horse and ride over.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you.” And he heard his voice
again. He didn’t know he was going to say it yet he did
know, he had known it all the time: “Maybe if you . .
His voice died. It was stopped, he never knew how because
Major de Spain did not speak and it was not until his voice
ceased that Major de Spain moved, turned back to the desk
and the paper spread on it and even that without moving
because he was sitting at the desk with a paper in his hand
when the boy entered, the boy standing there looking down
at the short plumpish gray-haired man in sober fine broad-
cloth and an immaculate glazed shirt whom he was used to
seeing in boots and muddy corduroy, unshaven, sitting the
shaggy powerful long-hocked mare with the worn Win-
chester carbine across the saddlebow and the great blue
dog standing motionless as bronze at the stirrup, the two

304 WILLIAM FAULKNER

of them in that last year and to the boy anyway coming
to resemble one another somehow as two people competent
for love or for business who have been in love or in busi-
ness together for a long time sometimes do. Major de Spain
did not look up again.

“No. I will be too busy. But good luck to you. If yon
have 14 you might bring me a young squirrel.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I will.”

He rode his mare, the three-year-old filly he had bred
and raised and broken himself. He left home a little after
midnight and six hours later, without even having sweated
her, he rode into Hoke’s, the tiny log-line junction which
he had always thought of as Major de Spain’s property too
although Major de Spain had merely sold the company
(and that many years ago) the land on which the sidetracks
and loading-platforms and the commissary store stood, and
looked about in shocked and grieved amazement even
though he had had forewarning and had believed himself
prepared: a new planing-mill already half completed which
would cover two or three acres and what looked like miles
and miles of stacked steel rails red with the light bright
rust of newness and of piled crossties sharp with creosote,
and wire corrals and feeding-troughs for two hundred
mules at least and the tents for the men who drove them;
ao that he arranged for the care and stabling of his mare as
rapidly as he could and did not look any more, mounted
into the log-train caboose with his gun and climbed into
(he cupola and looked no more save toward the wall of
wilderness ahead within which he would be able to hide
himself from it once more anyway.

Then the little locomotive shrieked and began to move:
a rapid churning of exhaust, a lethargic deliberate clash-
ing of slack couplings travelling backward along the train,
the exhaust changing to the deep slow clapping bites of

The Hear 305

power as the caboose too began to move and from the
cupola he watched the train’s head complete the first and
only curve in the entire line’s length and vanish into the
wilderness, dragging its length of train behind it so that
it resembled a small dingy harmless snake vanishing into
weeds, drawing him with it too until soon it ran once more
at its maximum clattering speed between the twin walls of
unaxed wilderness as of old. It had been harmless once.
Not five years ago Walter Ewell had shot a six-point buck
from this same moving caboose, and there was the story
of the half-grown bear: the train’s first trip in to the cutting
thirty miles away, the bear between the rails, its rear end
elevated like that of a playing puppy while it dug to see
what sort of ants or bugs they might contain or perhaps
just to examine the curious symmetrical squared barkless
logs which had appeared apparently from nowhere in one
endless mathematical line overnight, still digging until the
driver on the braked engine not fifty feet away blew the
whistle at it, whereupon it broke frantically and took the
first tree it came to: an ash sapling not much bigger than
a man’s thigh and climbed as high as it could and clung
there, its head ducked between its arms as a man (a woman
perhaps) might have done while the brakeman threw
chunks of ballast at it, and when the engine returned three
hours later with the first load of outbound logs the bear was
halfway down the tree and once more scrambled back up
as high as it could and clung again while the train passed
and was still there when the engine went in again in the
afternoon and still there when it came back out at dusk;
and Boon had been in Hoke’s with the wagon after a barrel
of flour that noon when the train-crew told about it and
Boon and Ash, both twenty years younger then, sat under
the tree all that night to keep anybody from shooting it and
the next morning Major de Spain had the log train held

30 6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

at Hoke’s and just before sundown on the second day, Ruth
not only Boon and Ash but Major de Spain and General
Compson and Walter and McCaslin, twelve then, watch*
tag, it came down the tree after almost thirty-six hours
without even water and McCaslin told him how for a min-
ute they thought it was going to stop right there at the
barrow-pit where they were standing and drink, how it
looked at the water and paused and looked at them and at
the water again, but did not, gone, running, as bears run,
the two sets of feet, front and back, tracking two separata
though parallel courses.

It had been harmless then They would hear the passing
log train sometimes from the camp; sometimes, because no-
body bothered to listen for it or not They would hear it
going in, running light and fast, the light clatter of the
trucks, the exhaust of the diminutive locomotive and its
shrill peanut-p archer whistle flung for one petty moment
and absorbed by the brooding and inattentive wilderness
without even an echo. They would hear it going out,
loaded, not quite so fast now yet giving its frantic and
toylike illusion of crawling speed, not whistling now to
conserve steam, flinging its bitten laboring miniature puff-
ing into the immemorial woodsface with frantic and boot-
less vainglory, empty and noisy a~d puerile, carrying to no
destination or purpose sticks which left nowhere any scar
or stump as the child’s toy loads and transports and unloads
its dead sand and rushes back for more, tireless and unceas-
ing and rapid yet never quite so fast as the Hand which
plays with it moves the toy burden back to load the toy
again. But it was different now. It was the same train,
engine cars and caboose, even the same enginemen brake-
man and conductor to whom Boon, drunk then sober then
drunk again then fairly sober once more all in the space
of fourteen hours, had bragged that day two years ago

The Bear 307

about what they were going to do to Old Ben tomorrow,
running with its same illusion of frantic rapidity between
the same twin walls of impenetrable and impervious woods,
passing the old landmarks, the old game crossings over
which he had trailed bucks wounded and not wounded and
more than once seen them, anything but wounded, bolt
out of the woods and up and across the embankment which
bore the rails and ties then down and into the woods again
as the earth-bound supposedly move but crossing as arrows
travel, groundless, elongated, three times their actual length
and even paler, different in color, as if there were a point
between immobility and absolute motion where even mass
chemically altered, changing without pain or agony not
only in bulk and shape but in color too, approaching the
color of wind, yet this time it was as though the train (and
not only the train but himself, not only his vision which
had seen it and his memory which remembered it but hia
clothes too, as garments carry back into the clean edgeless
blowing of air the lingering effluvium of a sick-room or of
death) had brought with it into the doomed wilderness
even before the actual axe the shadow and portent of the
new mill not even finished yet and the rails and ties which
were not even laid; and he knew now what he had known
as soon as he saw Hoke’s this morning but had not yet
thought into words: why Major de Spain had not come
back, and that after this time he himself, who had had to
see it one time other, would return no more.

Now they were near. He knew it before the engine-*
driver whistled to warn him. Then he saw Ash and the
wagon, the reins without doubt wrapped once more about
the brake-lever as within the boy’s own memory Major de
Spain had been forbidding him for eight years to do, the
train slowing, the slackened couplings jolting and clashing
again from car to car, the caboose slowing past the wagon

308 WILLIAM FAULKNER

as he swung down with his gun, the conductor leaning out
above him to signal the engine, the caboose still slowing,
creeping, although the engine’s exhaust was already slat-
ting in mounting tempo against the unechoing wilderness,
the crashing of draw-bars once more travelling backward
along the train, the caboose picking up speed at last. Then
it was gone. It had not been. He could no longer hear it.
The wilderness soared, musing, inattentive, myriad, eternal,
green; older than any mill shed, longer than any spur line.
“Mr Boon here yet?” he said.

“He beat me in,” Ash said. “Had the wagon loaded and
ready for me at Hoke’s yistiddy when I got there and setting
on the front steps at camp last night when I got in. He al-
ready been in the woods since fo daylight this morning.
Said he gwine up to the Gum Tree and for you to hunt up
that way and meet him.” He knew where that was: a single
big sweet-gum just outside the woods, in an old clearing; if
you crept up to it very quietly this time of year and then
ran suddenly into the clearing, sometimes you caught as
many as a dozen squirrels in it, trapped, since there was
no other tree near they could jump to. So he didn’t get
into the wagon at alL

“I will,” he said.

“I figured you would,” Ash said, “I fotch you a box
of shells.” He passed the shells down and began to un-
wrap the lines from the brake-pole.

“How many times up to now do you reckon Major has
told you not to do that?” the boy said.

“Do which?” Ash said. Then he said: “And tell Boon
Hogganbeck dinner gonter be . on the table in a hour and
if yawl want any to come on and eat it.”

“In an hour?” he said. “It aint nine oclock yet.” He
drew out his watch and extended it face-toward A sL
“Look.” Ash didn’t even look at the watch.

The Bear 309

“That’s town time. You aint In town now. You in the
woods.”

“Look at the sun then.”

“Nemmine the sun too,” Ash said* “If you and Boon
Hogganbeck want any dinner, you better come on in and
get it when I tole you. I aim to get done in that kitchen
because I got my wood to chop. And watch your feet.
They’re crawling.”

“I will,” he said.

Then he was in the woods, not alone but solitary; the
solitude closed about him, green with summer. They did
not change, and, timeless, would not, any more than would
the green of summer and the fire and rain of fall and the
iron cold and sometimes even snow

the day, the morning when he killed the buck and Sam
marked his face with its hot blood, they returned to camp
and he remembered old AsJis blinking and disgruntled and
even outraged disbelief until at last McCaslin had had to
affirm the fact that he had really killed it: and that night
Ash sat snarling and unapproachable behind the stove so
that Jennie's Jim had to serve the supper and waked them
with breakfast already on the table the next morning and
it was only half -past one oclock and at last out of Major de
Spain's angry cursing and Ash's snarling and sullen re*
joinders the fact emerged that Ash not only wanted to go
into the woods and shoot a deer also but he intended to
and Major de Spain said, 4 By God, if we dont let him we
wiU probably have to do the cooking from now on f and
Waiter Ewell said, 4 Or get up at midnight to eat what Ash
cooksS and since he had already killed his buck for this
hunt and was not to shoot again unless they needed meat,
he offered his gun to Ash until Major de Spain took com*
mand and allotted that gun to Boon for the day and gave
Boon's unpredictable pump gun to Ash, with two buckshot

310 WILLIAM FAULKNER

shells but Ash said, 7 got shells f and showed them, four:
one buck, one of number three shot for rabbits, two of bird-
shot and told one by one their history and their origin and
he remembered not Ash’s face alone but Major de Spain’s
and Walter's and General Compsorts too, and Ash’s voice:
4 Shoot, ? In course they’ll shoot! Genl Cawmpson guv me
this un’ — the buckshot — ’right outen the same gun he kilt
that big buck with eight years ago . And this un’ — it was
the rabbit sheik triumphantly — ’is oldem thisyer boyf And
that morning he loaded the gun himself, reversing the order:
the bird-shot, the rabbit, then the buck so that the buck-
shot would feed first into the chamber, and himself with-
out a gun, he and Ash walked beside Major de Spain? s
and Tennie’s Jirrfs horses and the dogs (that was the snow)
until they cast and struck, the sweet strong cries ringing
away into the muffled falling air and gone almost immedi-
ately, as if the constant and unmurmuring flakes had al-
ready buried even the unformed echoes beneath their
myriad and weightless falling, Major de Spain and Ten-
nis’s Jim gone too, whooping on into the woods; and then
it was all right, he knew as plainly as if Ash had told him
that Ash had now hunted his deer and that even his tender
years had been forgiven for having failed one, and they
turned back toward home through the falling snow — that
is. Ash said, ’Now whutV and he said, * This wa/ — him-
self in front because, although they were less than a mile
from camp, he knew that Ash, who had spent two weeks
of his life in the camp each year for the last twenty, had no
idea whatever where they were, until quite soon the manner
in which Ash carried Boon’s gun was making him a good
deal more than just nervous and he made Ash walk in
front, striding on, talking now, an old man’s garrulous
monologue beginning with where he was at the moment
then of the woods and of camping in the woods and of

The Bear 311

eating in camps then of eating then of cooking it and of his
wife’s cooking then briefly of his old wife and almost at
once and at length of a new light-colored woman who
nursed next door to Major de Spain’s and if she didrft
watch out who she was switching her tail at he would show
her how old was an old man or not if his wife just didrft
watch him all the time , the two of them in a game trail
through a dense brake of cane and brier which would
bring them out within a quarter-mile of camp, approaching
a big fallen tree trunk tying athwart the path and just as
Ash, still talking, was about to step over it the bear, the
yearling, rose suddenly beyond the log, sitting up, its fore-
arms against its chest and its wrists limply arrested as if it
had been surprised in the act of covering its face to pray:
and after a certain time Ash’s gun yawed jerkily up ami he
said, 4 You haven’t got a shell in the barrel yet . Pump it ?
but the gun already snicked and he said. Tump it . You
haven’t got a shell in the barrel yet? and Ash pumped the
action and in a certain time the gun steadied again and
snicked and he said. Tump it? and watched the buckshot
shell jerk, spinning heavily, into the cane . This is the
rabbit shot: he thought and the gun snicked and he t bought :
The next is bird-shot: and he didn’t have to say Pump
it; he cried, * Dont shoot! Dont shoot P but that was already
too late too, the light dry vicious snickt before he could
speak and the bear turned and dropped to all-fours and
then was gone and there was only the log, the cane, the
velvet and constant snow and Ash said, 4 Now whut ?’ and
he said, This way . Come on? and began to back away down
the path and Ash said, 4 I got to find my shells? and he said,
4 Goddamn it, goddamn it, come on? but Ash leaned the
gun against the tog and returned and stooped and fumbled
among the cane roots until he came back and stooped and
found the shells and they rose and at that moment the gun.

312 WILLIAM FAULKNER

untouched, leaning against the log six feet away and for
that while even forgotten by both of them , roared , bel-
lowed and flamed, and ceased: and he carried it now,
pumped out the last mummified shell and gave that one
also to Ash and, the action still open, himself carried the
gun until he stood it in the corner behind Boon's bed at
the camp

— ; summer, and fall, and snow, and wet and saprife
spring in their ordered immortal sequence, the deathless
and immemorial phases of the mother who had shaped him
if any had toward the man he almost was, mother and
father both to the old man bom of a Negro slave and a
Chickasaw chief who had been his spirit’s father if any
had, whom he had revered and harkened to and loved
and lost and grieved: and he would many someday and
they too would own for their brief while that brief unsub-
stanced glory which inherently of itself cannot last and
hence why glory: and they would, might, carry even the
remembrance of it into the time when flesh no longer talks
to flesh because memory at least does last: but still the
woods would be his mistress and his wife.

He was not going toward the Gum Tree. Actually he
was getting farther from it Time was and not so long ago
either when he would not have been allowed here without
someone with him, and a little later, when he had begun
to learn how much he did not know, he would not have
dared be here without someone with him, and later still,
beginning to ascertain, even if only dimly, the Hmits of
what he did not know, he could have attempted and car-
ried it through with a compass, not because of any in-
creased belief in himself but because McCaslin and Major
de Spain and Walter and General Compson too had taught
him at last to believe the compass regardless of what it
teemed to state. Now he did not even use the compass but

The Bear 313

merely the sun and that only subconsciously, yet he could
have taken a scaled map and plotted at any time to within
a hundred feet of where he actually was; and sure enough,
at almost the exact moment when he expected it, the earth
began to rise faintly, he passed one of the four concrete
markers set down by the lumber company’s surveyor to
establish the four comers of the plot which Major de Spain
had reserved out of the sale, then he stood on the crest of
the knoll itself, the four comer-markers all visible now,
blanched still even beneath the winter’s weathering, life-
less and shockingly alien in that place where dissolution it-
self was a seething turmoil of ejaculation tumescence con-
ception and birth, and death did not even exist. After two
winters’ blanketings of leaves and the flood-waters of two
springs, there was no trace of the two graves any more at
all. But those who would have come this far to find them
would not need headstones but would have found them
as Sam Fathers himself had taught him to find such: by
bearings on trees: and did, almost the first thrust of the
hunting knife finding (but only to see if it was still there)
the round tin box manufactured for axle-grease and con-
taining now Old Ben’s dried mutilated paw, resting above
lion’s bones.

He didn’t disturb it He didn’t even look for the other
grave where he and McCaslin and Major de Spain and
Boon had laid Sam’s body, along with his hunting horn
and his knife and his tobacco-pipe, that Sunday morning two
years ago; he didn’t have to. He had stepped over it, perhaps
on it. But that was all right. Be probably knew l was in the
woods this morning long before I got here, he thought,
going on to the tree which had supported one end of the
platform where Sam lay when McCaslin and Major de
Spain found them — the tree, the other axle-grease tin nailed
to the trunk, but weathered, rusted, alien too yet healed

314 WILLIAM FAULKNER

already into the wilderness’ concordant generality, raising
no tuneless note, and empty, long since empty of the food
and tobacco he had put into it that day, as empty of that
as it would presently be of this which he drew from his
pocket — the twist of tobacco, the new bandanna hand-*
kerchief, the small paper sack of the peppermint candy
which Sam had used to love; that gone too, almost before
he had turned his back, not vanished but merely trans-
lated into the myriad life which printed the dark mold of
these secret and sunless places with delicate fairy tracks,
which, breathing and biding and immobile, watched him
from beyond every twig and leaf until he moved, moving
again, walking on; he had not stopped, he had only paused,
quitting the knoll which was no abode of the dead because
there was no death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast
in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth,
myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part, leaf and twig
and particle, air and sun and rain and dew and night, acom
oak and leaf and acom again, dark and dawn and dark and
dawn again in their immutable progression and, being
myriad, one: and Old Ben too, Old Ben too; they would
give him his paw back even, certainly they would give
him his paw back: then the long challenge and the long
chase, no heart to be driven and outraged, no flesh to be.
mauled and bled — Even as he froze himself, he seemed
to hear Ash’s parting admonition. He could even hear the
voice as he froze, immobile, one foot just taking his weight,
the toe of the other just lifted behind him, not breathing,
feeling again and as always the sharp shocking inrush
from when Isaac McCaslin long yet was not, and so it was
fear all right but not fright as he looked down at it. It
had not coiled yet and the buzzer had not sounded either,
only one thick rapid contraction, one loop cast sideways
as though merely for purchase from which the raised head

The Bear 315

might start slightly backward, not in fright either, not in
threat quite yet, more than six feet of it, the head raised
higher than his knee and less than his knees' length away,
and old, the once-bright markings of its youth dulled now
to a monotone concordant too with the wilderness it
crawled and lurked: the old one, the ancient and accursed
about the earth, fatal and solitary and he could smell it
now: the thin sick smell of rotting cucumbers and some-
thing else which had no name, evocative of all knowledge
and an old weariness and of pariah-hood and of death. At
last it moved. Not the head. The elevation of the head did
not change as it began to glide away from him, moving
erect yet off the perpendicular as if the head and that ele-
vated third were complete and all: an entity walking on
two feet and free of all laws of mass and balance and should
have been because even now he could not quite believe
that all that shift and flow of shadow behind that walking
head could have been one snake: going and then gone;
he put the other foot down at last and didn’t know it,
standing with one hand raised as Sam had stood that after-
noon six years ago when Sara led him into the wilderness
and showed him and he ceased to be a child, speaking the
old tongue which Sam had spoken that day without pre-
meditation either: “Chief,” he said: “Grandfather.”

He couldn’t tell when he first began to hear the sound,
because when he became aware of it, it seemed to him
that he had been already hearing it for several seconds—*
a sound as though someone were hammering a gun-barrel
against a piece of railroad iron, a sound loud and heavy
and not rapid yet with something frenzied about it, as
if the hammerer were not only a strong man and an earnest
one but a little hysterical too. Yet it couldn’t be on the log
line because, although the track lay in that direction, it was
at least two miles from him and this sound was not three

$l6 WILLIAM FAULKNER

hundred yards away. But even as he thought that, he
realised where the sound must be coming from: whoever
the man was and whatever he was doing, he was some*
where near the edge of the clearing where the Gum Tree
was and where he was to meet Boon. So far, he had been
hunting as he advanced, moving slowly and quietly and
watching the ground and the trees both. Now he went on,
his gun unloaded and the barrel slanted up and back to
facilitate its passage through brier and undergrowth, ap-
proaching as it grew louder and louder that steady savage
somehow queerly hysterical beating of metal on metal,
emerging from the woods, into the old clearing, with the
solitary gum tree directly before him. At first glance the
tree seemed to be alive with frantic squirrels. There ap-
peared to be forty or fifty of them leaping and darting from
branch to branch until the whole tree had become one
green maelstrom of mad leaves, while from time to time,
singly or in twos and threes, squirrels would dart down
the trunk then whirl without stopping and rush back up
again as though sucked violently back by the vacuum of
their fellows’ frenzied vortex. Then he saw Boon, sitting,
his back against the trunk, his head bent, hammering
furiously at something on his lap. What he hammered
with was the barrel of his dismembered gun, what he ham-
mered at was the breech of it The rest of the gun lay scat-
tered about him in a half-dozen pieces while he bent over
the piece on his lap his scarlet and streaming walnut face,
hammering the disjointed barrel against die gun-breech
with the frantic abandon of a madman. He didn’t even
look up to see who it was. Still hammering, he merely
shouted back at the boy in a hoarse strangled voice:

“Get out of here! Dont touch them! Dont touch a one
of them! They’re mine!”

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